Orbital Marine Power (Orkney) PLC

Beyond the UK, tidal stream energy is gathering momentum globally and represents a ~100GW market. Orbital is at the forefront of targeting development rights for a leadership position in this market, with Europe and North America as the initial focus owing to their significant tidal resources and revenue support mechanisms. The ambition is to have achieved a pipeline of commercial scale by 2025. On this front, Orbital has been selected to deliver a turbine to a project in eastern Canada’s Bay of Fundy (where spring tidal speeds can exceed 5m/s). This project needs to pass through a licensing and consenting process, which will determine the minimum timelines before delivery of a turbine would be possible, but is a signal of international expansion and into a resource which is arguably unrivalled in scale and strength. More recently, also in North America, but this time in the USA, we had the exciting announcement that an Orbital tidal project being developed by utility customer OPALCO has been selected for Department of Energy funding to progress towards contracting phase.