Tocardo Acquisition

The Dutch have always been considered world class in water engineering. Tocardo continue this legacy with class leading tidal turbine technology. As inventor and manufacturer of the world’s largest commercial tidal array installation, Tocardo has an unbeaten track record of continuous tidal power production with turbines in the water, connected and runn. Tocardo’s turbines are direct-drive, with no gearbox offering long maintenance periods between services whilst their innovative, passive variable pitch system they have a patented offers significant performance and efficiency benefits.

Tocardo will continue to deliver its renowned turbines, after sales support and service. It will also continue investing to develop more powerful and cost effective tidal turbines. This will be done in partnership with QED Naval and HydroWing who bring a combined 40 years marine design, development and operations experience. Through a fully integrated platform solution combining the benefits of Subhub and HydroWing, improvements of over 25% site yield are achievable as well as cost savings of over 50% on operational deployment and ongoing maintenance.

With a predicted 60% growth in energy demand in the next 30 years, the sector is seen as having great potential. With Europe and America’s pressing need for predictable energy and to be less dependent on fossil fuels, unfortunately, wind and solar energy alone cannot do this. Dark nights, cloud cover and lack of wind cause large inconsistencies. Tidal power has a great opportunity with its consistency 365 days a year. The partnership also sees India, China and SE Asia as huge growth areas. Currently the global tidal market potential is approximately 500 GW, with an expected 32% growth to 50% share of power in total renewable energy consumption worldwide in the next 20 years. As a relatively new energy source, tidal’s levelised cost of energy will drop significantly with development, similar to that seen with wind.

The partnership now wants to take its technologies and develop projects using this proven technology to island communities or dedicated industrial applications. They intend to scale up production and capacity of the tidal turbines to make a real contribution to global Net Zero CO2 ambitions. To that end, it would be very interested in hearing from likeminded project partners.

Richard Parkinson (CEO of HydroWing said “This bigger, long term, end to end vision is quite unique in that it brings a pool of expertise and collaboration across European tidal energy that no other company has. The new JV is committed to expand and will be introducing their combined technologies in new projects starting in 2020”.

Andries Van Unen (Managing Director of Tocardo) said “In joining all these forces together there has been some great vision, hard work and expertise. We are very grateful to all parties who have helped get this partnership over the line: namely investors, existing customers, the hard-working staff and project team. We are now fortunate to be able to offer a much greater geographical presence, team and collaborative expertise to build on the technologies and results achieved over the years. We really can’t wait to show the market some of the exciting projects and innovations we are working on”.

Jeremy Smith (CEO of QED Naval Ltd) said “It is great that QED Naval and the Subhub technology has now a dedicated relationship with a tidal turbine developer and marine operator. This is something we have been trying to do many years. With links to some of Europe’s leading University research, this enables the JV to pool all this experience to deliver a collective vision for cost reduction of tidal projects”.

For all media enquiries please contact:

Andries van Unen: aun@tocardo.com

Keith Murray at QED: keith@qednaval.co.uk

Richard Parkinson at HydroWing: richard@hydrowing.com