Rockland to measure water turbulence at Black Rock’s tidal energy site

Canadian marine turbulence specialist Rockland Scientific will anchor a buoy to the seabed in the Minas Passage, Bay of Fundy, to measure water turbulence for Black Rock Tidal Power as part of the international project InSTREAM. 

The buoy will be installed at the site where Black Rock Tidal Power plans to install its tidal energy platform, and will gather data on natural water turbulence that will be used during testing in the UK labs next year, according to The Chronicle Herald.

The InSTREAM project, involving both academia and industry on both sides of the Atlantic, seeks to improve the understanding of turbulence in energetic tidal flows and will aid the development of marine energy conversion devices to consistently and reliably generate clean low carbon energy from strong tides and currents, FloWave’s website says.

The initiative is one of two projects that are announced under a memorandum of understanding between Nova Scotia and the UK and the two studies, worth a combined £710,000, will be funded by Innovate UK, Canadian federal government agencies, and private industry.

On the UK side FloWave, the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC), and Cambridge-based Ocean Array Systems (OAS) work alongside Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie University (‘Dal’) and Black Rock Tidal Power (BRTP), all under the leadership of British Columbia-based Rockland Scientific.

Black Rock plans to set up its floating platform, called Triton, which carries a number of Schottel instream turbines that can generate up to 2.5MW of electricity from tidal currents.

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