US company ORPC and its Irish subsidiary ORPC Ireland are partnering with a European consortium to create a new generation of marine renewable energy turbines that aim to increase reliability and performance while reducing manufacturing costs.
The ORPC team along with EireComposites of Galway and National University of Ireland Galway are collaborating with Germany’s Mitsubishi Chemical Advanced Materials and Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche from Italy on the initiative.
The project, which is called Commercialization of a Recyclable and Innovative Manufacturing Solution for an Optimized Novel (Crimson), is backed by funding from the European Commission via its Fast Track to Innovation program.
The total project is valued at €3.9m.
Crimson plans to bring to market ORPC’s river and tidal turbine, which has foils and is made entirely of recycled carbon fibre, while reducing capital expenditure and operating expenditure by 33% and 66% respectively.
ORPC chief executive Stuart Davies said: “ORPC’s growing operations in Ireland and Europe are an important part of the global demand for our clean, renewable marine energy solutions and the project will provide further technological advancements crucial to scaling the commercialisation of our marine energy systems in the region and around the world.”
ORPC and EireComposites began work together in 2019 building the turbines for the former’s first commercial RivGen system (pictured) installed to power the remote community of Igiugig, Alaska.
ORPC director of European operations James Donegan said: “ORPC’s river and tidal devices involve deployment, anchoring and converting the energy from free-flowing rivers and tidal currents into sustainable renewable energy.
“Having worked with EireComposites and NUI Galway on previous and current Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland projects, we look forward to working with them on developing our megawatt-scale turbine and we are confident in the team’s ability to achieve the ambitious targets laid out by the Crimson project.”
EireComposites chief executive Tomas Flanagan said: “At the conclusion of this project, we will have delivered a product that will have a positive impact on both the renewable energy sector and wider society.
“There is no doubt that society is progressing towards greener communities and I believe Crimson will play a positive role in this transition in terms of driving down costs for both the industry and consumers but also increase the productivity of the renewable energy sector.”
The project is a continuation of previous research conducted by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland and is supported by Udaras na Gaeltachta and Enterprise Ireland.