Tidal power company Atlantis Resources said two Andritz Hydro Hammerfest turbines have been reinstalled and reconnected to resume operations at its MeyGen project in Scotland, with a third to follow in August.
MeyGen is the company's project that will see the development of a tidal stream project of up to 398 megawatts at an offshore site between Scotland's northernmost coast and the island of Stroma. The project is being developed in phases, with the current focus on Phase 1A.
As previously announced, the three Andritz Hydro Hammerfest turbines were recovered earlier this year following an initial period of operations to enable system enhancements derived from the lessons learned during installation and subsea commissioning to be implemented.
Following this programme of turbine improvements, two of the three turbines were successfully reinstalled and reconnected, and have recommenced power generation to the grid.
The third AHH turbine is due to be reinstalled during the next workable neap tide which is in August, together with the Atlantis AR1500 turbine. The Atlantis turbine was also retrieved in the spring of this year to assess the effects of a prolonged grid connection outage which was caused by damage to part of the onshore power distribution network near the MeyGen site.
"The cable damage has since been repaired and the site's grid export capacity has been restored. After assessment of the turbine it was decided that one of the components of the turbine's pitching system should be replaced and upgraded as a result of the exposure to an unexpectedly long idle cycle," said Atlantis.
"As commissioning and autonomous operation had been well progressed following initial installation, it is expected that full power will be achieved from each turbine soon after redeployment. The turbines will then enter into their final contractual performance and autonomous reliability tests after which they will be signed off for commencement of long term operations," Atlantis added.
Atlantis said it is expected that MeyGen Phase 1A will be operating autonomously at full 6 megawatts of capacity by the end of the third quarter.
"Prior to retrieval of the turbines in the spring we had already achieved significant autonomous operation at full output and the power performance of both turbine types showed improvements over the contractual output guarantees. We expect this to put the project on track to achieve capacity factors significantly in excess of 40%," said Chief Executive Tim Cornelius.