Marine Current Turbines Ltd (MCT), Mojo Maritime Ltd (MML), Queens University Belfast (QUB) and the University of Edinburgh (UoE) have formed a collaboration to further develop MCT’s proposals for a fully submerged evolution of the current SeaGen device deployed in Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland. The project aims to produce a fully submerged variant of the turbine for applications in water depths greater than 35m. The work is under supported by a grant under the TSB call “Wave & Tidal Stream Technology -Strand 2 -Novel Concept Devices”. This collaboration has been formed on the basis of the skills and resources provided by each of the members: - MCT are the technology developers with a long term business plan dependent on the success of the development of marine tidal turbine technologies. - MML are a marine contracting company with a business development plan dependent on the success of the development of tidal and wave technology development, and are hence keen to support early stage development to input their expertise at the design and evaluation stage. - UoE have had a long term involvement in tidal and wave energy research and have facilities and staff that can support the early concept development and evaluation phases of the proposed project. - QUB have a facility in Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland which can be used to deploy a large scale model. They have the expertise to deploy, monitor and evaluate the results from the large scale model. This document outlines how each of the project partners proposes to exploit the outputs of the project. The main focus of the project is that of operation and maintenance of the turbines. The project aims to provide a full scale design which will facilitate easy access that can be conducted by low cost, readily available vessels relatively independent of weather conditions. This approach can readily be seen in the SeaGen device with the surface breaking structure and the ability to raise the cross beam to gain access to the drive trains. This rationale is focussed on reducing the cost of tide energy generation and providing a step change in its strength as a competitive renewable energy generation technology.

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The proposed project enables additional environmental studies to be conducted during 18 months of operation of SeaGen in Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland. SeaGen is a full commercial scale 1.2MW device which was installed in April 2008. By March 2012 SeaGen had delivered 4 GWh of electricity to the grid. These additional studies are not part of the environmental monitoring programme (EMP) required as part of the consenting process to install and operate SeaGen in Strangford Lough. The EMP was conducted between March 2008 and March 2011. The additional studies are aimed at providing data to help the regulators assess the impacts of tidal arrays on the environment. The studies will focus on three areas: • The QUB studies enhanced the data already gathered to predict the impacts of arrays upon benthic communities. • The University of Exeter utilised existing bird data sets, and augmented these results with additional field surveys to assess the impacts of tidal arrays on birds. • The Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR) at the University of Southampton conducted subsea noise surveys on SeaGen to ; assess the impacts of this noise on the subsea environment, identify the noise sources on SeaGen and work with MCT To reduce the potential for noise generation. ISVR also produced a noise propagation model to extrapolate the potential noise from tidal array sites.