Works At World-leading 'flagship' Tidal Turbine 'meygen' Sea-bed Site In Pentland Firth Re-commence

10th May 2017

A heavy-duty offshore construction vessel arrived in the Inner Sound ... between Gills Bay and Stroma isle ... in the early hours of yesterday (Tuesd. 09.05.17) to continue works on Atlantis Resources Ltd's pioneering MeyGen tidal turbine site.

The 6,600 tonne, 105 metre long Olympic Challenger vessel is a sister-ship of Olympic Ares, which has previously been involved in fitting and retrieving the four 'horizontal hydro' electricity-generating turbines at the 'fast-flow' tidal site in a 1.5 mile wide 'secondary strait' off the Pentland Firth's main international shipping channel.

The four turbines were installed from late last year (2016) onwards and were slotted in position on top of 20-metres tall 'steel jackets' specially fabricated at Global Energy's massive Energy Park at Nigg, on the shores of the Cromarty Firth, near Inverness. The 'jackets' are held in place on the c. 30 metre deep bare-rock Caithness flagstone seabed by huge steel ballast blocks manufactured locally by JGC Engineering Ltd of Halkirk, Caithness.

Nigg, where all four of the turbines were part-fabricated and assembled, was the base from where Olympic Challenger sailed shortly after 18:00 on Monday 08/05 evening.

The four turbines, which make up Phase 1A of the £50 million MeyGen development ... that Atlantis RL describes as its world-wide tidal 'flagship' project, were removed from the 'demonstration' site in March and taken back to Nigg for modifications to be undertaken there in the light of operating experience.

Three of the generating units ... each of 1.5 MW ... were substantially manufactured at a factory in Ravensburg, SW Germany, that is owned by Austria-based Andritz, Europe's biggest builder of hydro-electric turbines.

The fourth one was designed by Edinburgh-based. AIM-listed (London junior Stock Exchange) Atlantis RL, with a considerable input from a specialist high-tech team from Lockheed Martin, the giant US defense industry corporation best-known for building supersonic war-planes and ballistic missiles.

A senior Atlantis RL spokesman had earlier stated that the turbines would be re-instated during Neap tides sequences during May and June 2017 and its contractor Bibby Offshore had issued the appropriate warning 'Notices to Mariners' for the Inner Sound but had also stated that the Inner Sound works could occur at any date prior to June 30th.

Bibby Offshore Ltd is an Aberdeen-based, wholly-owned, subsidiary of the venerable 200-year-old family-owned Bibby Line shipping and logistics company of Liverpool.

Design work is proceeding on Phase 1B of the MeyGen site, where all four 1.5/ 2 MW turbines will be manufactured to a design purchased by Atlantis RL from huge German electrical engineering giants Siemens.

Those four turbines, devised at a former Siemens facility in Bristol, are expected to be installed by mid-to-late 2018, but this time used steel supports piled ten metres down into the rocky seabed, rather than 'gravity' weights as in Phase 1A.

Works onshore and in the narrow channel ... between Gills Bay and Stroma ... on Phase 1B are expected to commence later this summer. This will include directional drilling under Gills Bay's rocky coastline at Ness of Quoys and further construction works on the 'Power Conversion Units' there, expected to commence in August this year.

Meanwhile senior Atlantis RL directors and managers will be giving hundreds of delegates an update report on its MeyGen site progress at All-Energy.

This is Britain's largest 'renewables-energy' conference and exhibition, held at Glasgow's Scottish Exhibitions & Conference Centre (SECC) on the banks of the River Clyde in Glasgow today (Wed. 10.05.17) and tomorrow.

Also there will be representatives of Gills Harbour Ltd, the community-owned busy little Caithness port on the shores of the Inner Sound, who will outline 'affordable' plans for a modern work-boat base there to support works in the Inner Sound.

This will be done in the form of a preliminary e-edition of its all-new Gills Harbour illustrated brochure.

The planned new base will also provide 24/7 workboat berthing shelter for the other three sites in the Eastern Pentland Firth that have been earmarked as seabed locations under leases granted for tidal electricity developments by the Crown Estate.

It has followed a comprehensive survey and 'wave modelling' study compiled this spring for the Canisbay-based harbour company by a small post-graduate team from the University of the Highlands & Islands Environmental Research Institute at its Thurso campus, headed by Dr Jason McIlvenny.



This has included a flying 'drone' and detailed electronic survey works conducted from its ERI Aurora small research vessel launched from Gills Harbour's 8-metre-wide hard slipway. she was skippered by William Simpson, a Gills Harbour Ltd director, whose family owns 1,000-acre Stroma ... Caithness's only island ... that is used as a livestock farm.

Atlantis RL aims to have an out-of-sight seabed 400 MW power station commissioned by 2015 in the Inner Sound, producing enough power for a city the size of Aberdeen.

The full Pentland Firth tidal=-power potential ... including developing its main deeper-water international shipping channel ... is estimated by experts as being almost three times the (capacity) size of Hinkley Point in Somerset, the UK's first nuclear power station for twenty years, where construction begun earlier this year.

Tidal electricity many-purpose workboats are typically c. 24/26 metre rectangular steel vessels that cost up to £3.5 million as 'new-builds: several are owned and operated by four Orkney companies. Independent studies show that those will be required for a wide-variety of tidal turbine tasks etc. for at least the next two or three decades.

See more about Olympic challenger at -

http://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:374078/mmsi:311073200/imo:9398292/vessel:OLYMPIC_CHALLENGER