Visits to sea energy sites along Border

Some of the world’s foremost developers of marine energy visited projects on both sites of the Border at the weekend.

The visitors, who last week attended a three-day conference in Dublin’s Convention Centre, visited Irish company OpenHydro’s tidal turbine design facility and factory at Greencore, Co Louth. The same day they travelled to see Marine Current Turbine’s SeaGen tidal turbine in operation in Strangford Lough, Co Down.

While in Greenore the visitors – some 120 of the 900 conference delegates – saw mock-up models of the latest technology for generating electricity from sea power.

James Ives, OpenHydro’s chief executive, said the company’s vision was to deploy arrays of tidal turbines under the world’s oceans “silently and invisibly generating electricity at no cost to the environment”.

The visits were organised by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, which, along with the Marine Institute, has a quarter-scale test facility for marine energy devices in Galway Bay.