OCTARRAY is part of an an ambitious 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.

MAREWIND addresses the main aspects related with materials durability and maintenance in offshore structures which consequently suppose failures, misfunctioning, loss of efficiency in energy generation and which have a major repercussion in O&M costs and capital costs. With the combined forces of key-players in the current value chain of wind energy, MAREWIND cover a set of ambitious targets focused on: (1) enhancing corrosion protection systems and durability, (2) effective and durable antifouling solutions without using biocides, (3) erosion protection and mechanical reinforcement in wind blades, (4) predictive modelling and monitoring and (5) increasing recyclability. These objectives will be developed considering three main pillars addressing all those aspects related with (a) Scalable manufacturing technologies, (b) Safer-by-design materials avoiding environmental concerns and (c) standardisation aspects for effective European deployment of marketable and usable technologies. Consortium Partners and core business are one of the strongest points of MAREWIND. Technological and scientific partners (LUREDERRA, TWI, CETMA, INEGI, IDENER and INL) are experts on main areas of materials and technologies to be improved: coatings, concrete, composites, monitoring and predictive methods, thus the initial TRL 4 is assured. Companies involved cover the whole value chain on offshore wind and therefore will validate prototypes, results and costs along the project under accelerated testing and real environment. TECNAN will produce at industrial scale coatings, TSF will produce coated fastening elements, EIRE will produce prototypes of wind blades, ACCIONA will produce concrete prototypes, KOSHKIL will provide validation in maintenance, NAVAL as leading in floating will validate materials and assess repercussions in designs and EDF as operator of offshore renewables will provide data, real offshore locations for testing and costs models for final validation of technologies.

Ocean Energy can play an important role in addressing one of the EU’s biggest challenges: providing clean, affordable and sustainable energy. However, ocean energy technologies are not yet mature enough to overcome all challenges related to performance, reliability, survivability, and resulting cost of energy. DTOceanPlus will accelerate the commercialisation of the Ocean Energy sector by developing and demonstrating an open source suite of design tools for the selection, development, deployment and assessment of ocean energy systems (including sub-systems, energy capture devices and arrays). This will align innovation and development processes with those used in mature engineering sectors. - Technology concept selection will be facilitated by a Structured Innovation tool. - Technology development will be enabled by a Stage-Gate tool. - Technology deployment will be supported by a 2nd generation of the FP7 DTOcean tools. This suite of design tools will reduce the technical and financial risks of the technology to achieve the deployment of cost-competitive wave and tidal arrays. DTOceanPlus will underpin a rapid reduction in the Levelised Cost of Energy offered by facilitating improvement in the reliability, performance and survivability of ocean energy systems and analysing the impact of design on energy yield, O&M and the environment, thus making the sector more attractive for private investment. These objectives and impacts will be achieved through the implementation of 9 work packages covering user engagement, tool development, demonstration of tools against real projects (thus outputting a suite of tools at TRL 6), analysis of supply chains and potential markets, exploitation, dissemination and education. The DTOceanPlus consortium has been formed to include representatives of all key user and stakeholder groups. It includes all core partners from the FP7 DTOcean project along with the developers of Europe’s leading ocean energy sub-systems, devices and arrays.