Fresh on the heels of landing a $14 million investment, Atlantis Resources now has a deal to install a 1-megawatt tidal power turbine off the Australian coast, according to The Australian.
Singapore-based Atlantis plans to provide the power to iron ore producer Mount Gibson Iron (no relation to Australia's most famous Hollywood export) for its operations on Koolan Island in western Australia.
Just last month, Atlantis got a $14 million boost from Norwegian renewable energy provider Statkraft, which said it would work with Atlantis to install tidal power devices in Scotland's Pentland Firth (see Ocean-Power-Meets-Bike-Chain Company Gets $14M). That £300 million ($697 million) project is aimed at producing 150 megawatts of power for a Scottish data center.
Atlantis also has a memorandum of understanding to build projects with China Light & Power, which brings its total pipeline of projects to 800 megawatts.
Atlantis offers a deep-water tidal turbine called the Solon, as well as a shallow-water device called the Nereus. The company's other big investor is Morgan Stanley, which became its largest shareholder in September when Atlantis acquired Morgan Stanley-owned tidal power company Current Resources.
One interesting note about tidal power is that, unlike wind and solar power, the ebb and flow of the tides is eminently predictable. That can make it useful for providing baseload power for industrial uses that can be scheduled in advance.
It and its cousin, wave power, could grow from less than 10 megawatts last year to a $500 million, 1 gigawatt market by 2014, according to an October report by Greentech Media and the Prometheus Institute (see Trawling for $500M in Ocean Power and Tide Turning for Ocean Power?)
Still, both forms of ocean power have seen their ups and downs. Many trial tidal projects have seen the power of the tides mangle the turbines meant to capture it. And several prominent wave power projects have been sunk in the last year, either literally or financially speaking (see this Green Light post).
Tidal power players include U.K.-based Lunar Power, which wants to provide 300 megawatts of energy for Korean Midland Power Co. by 2015, and Marine Current Turbines, whose $20 million tidal power project off the coast of Northern Ireland called SeaGen is now generating 1.2 megawatts.
New York City-based tidal power company Verdant Power has a $2.2 million deal with the government of Ontario for a 15-megawatt project in the St. Lawrence River. It also has a turbine in New York's East River, though two previous attempts failed (see Time magazine article).
