Tide turns for renewable power

Herald Sun
Friday 3/4/2009 Page: 69

A STATE-owned Norwegian company this week poured $US14 million into Australian tidal power company Atlantis Resources Corporation. Statkraft, one of the world's largest renewable energy groups, has also signed upwith Atlantis Resources to develop tidal current electricity projects in Europe. The deal comes just days ahead of the release of an independent report by Black & Veitch on Atlantis Resources's deep-water Solon AG turbine, which was tested in Tasmania's Tamar River and will be installed northwest of Phillip Island.

Chief executive Tim Cornelius said early results suggested it was "potentially the most efficient tidal turbine of scale ever built". Another of the company's turbines, the shallow-water Nereus, has been connected to the electricity grid to the east of Phillip Island for nearly a year. Statkraft joins investment bank Morgan Stanley, which owns 49% of Atlantis Resources, in a growing group of enterprises recognising tidal power as the most reliable form of renewable energy, because of the predictability of its flows.

In December, Asian power giant CLP Group signed on in the biggest ever tidal energy deal, boosting Atlantis Resources's project pipeline to 800 MWs. "Over the next 12 months, once the markets improve, we may consider a liquidity event," said Mr Cornelius, a marine biologist and deep sea engineer. Originally from Albert Park, Mr Cornelius was headhunted by the inventors of the tidal technology, Greg Beaver and Nick Perry, to globalise the Australian start-up.

"We found no support, no funding in Australia so in 2006 we moved our IP operations to Singapore, where there were better tax incentives," said Mr Cornelius, who was in Melbourne yesterday for the Australasian Cleantech Forum. Atlantis Resources has been chosen to power a planned data centre in Scotland with a 150MW-tidal energy farm.