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Scaling up to the Normandie Hydro Open-Centre Tidal Turbine Pilot Array

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - OCTARRAY (Scaling up to the Normandie Hydro Open-Centre Tidal Turbine Pilot Array)

Reporting period: 2019-03-01 to 2020-08-31

OCTARRAY is part of a 3-year tidal array demonstration programme located in North Western French territorial waters of the Raz Blanchard, a 15 km strait situated between Cap de la Hague and Alderney Island. The array (known as the Normandie Hydro array) will consist of 7 x 2.0MW Open-Centre Turbines (OCT) designed and constructed by the OpenHydro Group which will be installed at depths of between 30 and 40 meters with a total capacity of 14MW. The turbines will be connected by inter-array cabling via a subsea connector and exported onto the grid via an export cable and substation. The project is scheduled to commence operations and begin exporting grid compliant power to the French National Grid in 2019. The objectives of the project are to develop, construct and operate a tidal turbine array in real conditions and to test and confirm the technical and economic viability of tidal energy in preparation for developments on an industrial and commercial scale. The successful demonstration of the pilot array will achieve several technical, industrial, economic and commercial ‘firsts’ which will facilitate and accelerate the development and growth of the tidal industry.
OCTARRAY will establish new knowledge and capability to enable the scale up to future commercial arrays (up to 300MW), Levelised Cost of Energy reduction and will provide valuable data and learning on array effects and performance for the benefit of future tidal array projects in the rest of Europe and strategic locations in the world for renewable energy development. Through projects such as OCTARRAY and the Normandie Hydro array, Europe has the opportunity to significantly build its reputation as a world leader in the development and integration of tidal energy, and benefit from the diversity that the technology brings to the overall energy generation portfolio.
EMEC:

During the 3 months that EMEC manage OCTARRAY the following have been accomplished:

Myles Heward Project Manage the Octarray project full time from September to December until the suspension of the project.
During this period, EMEC led on getting fortnightly meeting and Finance coordination to distribute the pre-financing. Further the marketing activities have been started and a series of logo designed for choices by the partners (provided), the choice was not made yet when the suspension was announced which is why there is no final logo.
EMEC organised the Kick-off meeting (Minutes attached D1.1). The 21 actions listed at the end of the minutes have been dealt with.

Significant time have been dedicated to work on the risk register with the consortium to agree risk, scores, mitigation and scores after mitigations (see the attached deliverables D1.3). The risk register also contains a contingency plan that have been discuss on the basis of Open Hydro return of experience on the operations and EMEC process on the Integrated Management System and the different Emergency Procedures and related Standard Operating Procedures test trial at EMEC test site. Further the Health and Safety aspect have been discussed and approved in the Deliverables D9.6.

During the 3 months of implementation of OCTARRAY, Task 6.1 Operation and Monitoring Incident Planning have been explored in more detailed by the consortium, and EMEC dedicated substantial amount of time with JBA.
JBA was approach as a potential Operation and Maintenance (O&M) tool provider for the marine operations of the Open Hydro device and specifically looking at data collection and analysis.

To create a detailed specification of work for the application of those innovative O&M EMEC had several meetings looking at the opportunities for OCTARRAY and assessing the interest of the supply chain in supporting the development of specific suite of tools for Tidal Turbine and the key requirements for OCTARRAY and Open Hydro. During those researches, several meeting with JBA have led EMEC to suggest tools around:
• Turbine Information
• Turbine power curve for the analysis of the performances and correlate that information with key MET Ocean data and operations of the turbines components.
• Tolerances of vessels to tides, waves and currents for the different type of operations needed for the installation, maintenance and operations of the Open Hydro turbine.
• Historical meteocean data of the site, to allow modelisation and verification of the data collected in real time
Several meetings have looked at how to deal with sensitive data in the tool and the OCTARRAY consortium. Open Hydro was particularly looking at how to secure the turbine power curve analysis and make sure that confidentiality was part of the specification.


DTU:

Technical part

Following tasks were performed in WP1 by the 1.28 PMs:

DTUs activities on the project includes preparation and participation in the kick-off meeting.
Initial planning and design of the proposed physical model experiments. This planning was discussed with other
project partners. As part of this planning the first steps towards a scale model were taken, and a draft of a tidal turbine
model was produced using DTU-MEKs 3D-printer facility. The model setup was discussed with all members of the project group at DTU.
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