The Uisce Tapa Project (Rio Fundo Operations Canada Limited)

Rio Fundo Operations Canada Limited and Halagonia Tidal Energy Limited are developers of Berth B and E respectively at the Fundy Ocean Research Center for Energy (FORCE). Both are led by the collaborative of Uisce Tapa, a DP Energy project.

The berths are being developed together as a single project under the banner Uisce Tapa, which means “fast water” in Gaelic. This approach allow the project to benefit from an economy of scale, combined marine operations and a reduced exposure to technology risk.

The Project will have an installed capacity of 9 MW comprising six 1.5 MW ANDRITZ Mk1 seabed mounted devices.  These devices will be materially the same as the ANDRITZ machines deployed at the MeyGen project in Scotland, UK. The turbines will include a number of iterative improvements made as a result of manufacturing and operational learning to date. 

The Mk1 turbine is a 3 bladed, horizontal axis open rotor machine with a   rotor diameter of 18.4. The turbines will be mounted on the seabed, supported by way of a ballasted substructure.

Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCPs) were deployed in late July 2019 in order to collect data on the flow characteristics at site. This data will be used to corroborate the predicted site characteristics based on previous CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamic) models for the site. The devices will be retrieved in August with analysis expected to complete by the end of September 2019.

Rio Fundo Operations Canada Limited’s name reflects a very ancient Portuguese label for the Bay of Fundy