This paper discusses the background and development of “Seagen”, MCT’s (Marine Current Turbines ™ Ltd's) pioneering technology for the exploitation of tidal stream energy.
Offshore engineering is generally noted for being fraught with technical difficulties which make it costly. Although these can generally be overcome with large investments when the huge rewards of offshore oil and gas are to be expected in return, renewable energy technologies have to be as inexpensive as possible if they are to deliver affordable energy from a diffuse resource. Squaring this circle of coming up with robust, reliable new offshore technologies which also have low costs is a great challenge, but the rewards for success in this field could be enormous, not just in financial terms but also in terms of value to humanity in future. To this end we believe MCT has a world lead in delivering a commercial demonstrator in the megawatt size class as will be described later in this paper.
