CoTide brings together four world-leading centres at the Universities of Oxford, Edinburgh, Sheffield, and Strathclyde with the multi-disciplinary and complementary skills and track record needed to deliver co-design for tidal stream energy.

The development of tidal stream energy presents a significant opportunity for the UK. Delivering on net-zero and climate change objectives will require the development and exploitation of all renewable energy resources to provide a robust and secure energy supply. The predictability of the tidal resource is a key benefit that can substantially contribute to resilient energy networks and complement less predictable renewable energy resources eg wind, wave, solar. However, the harsh marine environment is challenging to deploy into, and there are many interconnected aspects of tidal system design and control that must be considered.

The next steps for the industry are crucial: how to deliver tidal stream energy at scales that make a meaningful energy contribution? This hinges on delivering reliable, high performance, scalable, and sustainable engineering solutions at acceptable cost. Efforts will likely continue to stall while costs remain high.

CoTide vision

Our vision for CoTide is to develop and demonstrate holistic integrated tools and design processes for tidal stream energy that will significantly reduce costs by removing unnecessary redundancy and improving confidence in engineering solutions, providing the transformative engineering processes and designs that will enable tidal energy to make a significant contribution to achieving climate change objectives by 2030-40.

Funding

CoTide is a programme grant funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council under grant reference EP/X03903X/1.

Partners