Helping turn the tide
on climate change
Key Technology Features
Twin turbines fixed to retractable legs, mounted to an innovative floating platform, enable the tidal turbine to be positioned in the most energetic parts of the water flow with minimum site construction work.
The retractable leg function provides rapid, easy service interventions for all major systems and components.
Tidal Application
With 40% of the global population living within close proximity of the coastline, where the tides flow fastest, there is abundant demand from homes and industries needing to decarbonise with predictable, clean power.
Ocean Currents
Currents flow around the world’s oceans as massive, cohesive streams that are continuously moving vast volumes of seawater over huge distances, making the ocean the most environmentally analogous setting for Orbital’s existing technology.
With relatively modest optimisation to Orbital’s existing multi-MW scale, tidal stream technology; phenomenal volumes of clean, dense kinetic energy from ocean currents could be harnessed.
River Application
Scaled down to capture power from river flow, our platform, can support off-grid demands from communities, households and electric vehicle charge points.
The retractable leg design also allows the turbine to be towed through shallow river systems without the need for specialist vessels with minimal environmental disruption and the potential to bring power to individual households.
The Future
The dependable characteristics of tidal energy allow us to predict how much low-carbon electricity our turbines will produce and when, presenting a unique opportunity to be complementary to future energy systems that will have a reliance on intermittent renewable sources of power.
The company has an established portfolio of multi-MW tidal stream projects, focused initially within UK waters, but also with an early stage global pipeline.
The O2
The O2, Orbital’s commercial demonstrator, is the world’s most powerful tidal turbine and has been operational since July 2021 in Orkney, where it is connected to the UK electricity grid. It is a 74m long floating superstructure, supporting two 1 MW turbines on either side for a nameplate power output of 2MW.
It can generate enough clean, predictable electricity to meet the demand of around 2,000 UK homes and offset approximately 2,200 tonnes of CO2 production per year.
The SR2000
In 2016 Orbital launched the SR2000. The SR2000 produced in excess of 3GWh of electricity over a 12-month continuous test programme. At the time this represented more power from a single turbine than had been generated cumulatively by the wave and tidal sector in Scotland over the 12 years prior to the launch of the SR2000.
The SR2000 was an industry breakthrough and validated both the engineering and conceptual benefits of Orbital’s technology and thereby enabled the pioneering vision for O2.