Reliability assessment of tidal stream energy: significance for large-scale deployment in the UK

Abstract

The UK has ambitious plans to harness its available tidal stream resource, estimated at 95TWh/year by The Crown Estate (2013). The economic viability of large-scale deployments will be largely governed by aspects of plant availability, including reliability. Using available information on environmental parameters of (pre-) consented sites across the UK, this paper explores subassembly target reliability levels for tidal stream devices. Reliability models of devices are investigated to establish the influence of environmental site conditions with regard to underlying subassembly failure rates and target reliability levels. Hence, a relia-bility-focussed perspective on the planned deployments is presented.