Atlantis to tap tidal energy with WA plant

Australian
Monday 6/4/2009 Page: 24

MARINE energy company Atlantis Resources Corp hopes to achieve a world first later this year with the installation of a 1MW tidal energy plant to help power an iron ore project in Western Australia. Atlantis Resources, an Australian-founded company now based in Singapore, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Mt Gibson Iron to install a 16.5m turbine the world's biggest single rotor marine turbine to supply power to its operations at Koolan Island.

Atlantis Resources already has a smaller turbine installed at Phillip Island near Melbourne which has been feeding electricity into the grid for the past nine months. Chief executive Tim Cornelius says the Koolan Islandand facility will be the first time tidal power has been used to directly power an industrial facility.

Atlantis Resources last week completed a new round of funding $U514 million ($19.6 million) which brought in Norwegian utility Statkraft as a new investor. It joins Morgan Stanley (49% ) and its founding shareholders. Atlantis Resources was founded in Australia, but moved to Singapore in 2006 for reasons that included greater access to funding and better protection for its intellectual property.

Cornelius says Atlantis Resources hopes to have up to 800MW of installed capacity within five years, an ambitious goal that will make it by far the largest marine energy company in the world. It has signed an MOU with China Light and Power for up to 500MW of capacity, and has signed a deal for up to 150MW of capacity to help power a data centre in the north of Scotland. "We've got credibility and we've got a huge appetite," Cornelius says. "And now we have confluence of supporting mechanisms that is driving interest."

tidal power is not strictly base-load, but it is highly predictable, and therefore can be scheduled in lots of 25 minutes, 30 years in advance which makes it attractive to utilities. Cornelius will not reveal costings, but says tidal is more cost-competitive than offshore wind, but needs the support of a feed-in tariff, or some similar mechanism, to attract interest for the grid.

However, like solar thermal, tidal power is also attractive to remote, off-grid mining and industrial locations where the only alternative is expensive and heavy-emitting diesel generators. Cornelius says Western Australia has one of the best tidal resources in the world, with potential for up to 1000MW of capacity, and parts of Queensland, including areas around Gladstone, are also highly prospective.