After two years of development, design, engineering and production the Tidetec turbine is finally installed in the test rig at the Technical University of Munich. This turbine is designed to fit into Tidetecs Turret, see picture below:
The following month the turbine will be tested to show performance data for the turbine – these tests will quantify how much better this turbine is for a full operation cycle than the traditional bi-directional Kaplan bulb turbine – initial estimates show a 9-11 % increase, due to optimal efficiency in both directions, and due to the possibility to conduct blade/turbine maintenance.
The performance data from these lab tests will verify that our turbine currently is the state of the art when it comes to overall efficiency for these types of turbines. We hope this turbine is an eyeopener for the existing tidal barrage turbine producers – seeing what is possible to achieve for bi-directional tidal lagoon turbines. In addition to increase in efficiency – the Tidetec solution is 35% lighter, has reduced number of moving parts in the turbine by having a fixed pitch runner. The cost saving on this system compared to the Kaplan bulb offered by Andritz and GE are expected to be in the range of 6-9%.
Even though using traditional turbines – the lagoon industry is in its infancy regarding technology and there are still many opportunities to create more efficient systems. Once the tidal lagoon market initiates it is a question of time before someone creates a fully optimised turbine – Tidetec has now shown the solution for this optimised turbine.
From a developers point of view this turbine would change the whole investment case for Tidal lagoons – return on equity increases by over 60%, due to reduced capex cost and increased efficiency.
We are extremely proud of this achievement and we want to give a thanks to all contributors who have made this turbine possible: TUM (Wilfried Knapp, Stephan Hötzl, Tobias Schechtl and Thomas Siewert), Minikraft, Metrotidal, Mareval, Norwegian Research Council (Eurostars) and 1-Tech.
