In the midst of Brexit and a new decade, QED Naval and HydroWing are delighted to announce a new collaborative European joint venture and with it the acquisition of Holland’s premier tidal turbines business, Tocardo.

This tri-partite, collaborative partnership brings together decades of multi-sector expertise as well as a blend of well tested, complementary products. This new and innovative joint venture provides a truly end to end service with a spectrum of turbines, foundation systems, marine operations, as well as design, support and service expertise.

Tocardo’s technology development started in 1999 in cooperation with the Energy Research Foundation ECN and various Dutch engineering companies. First prototyped in 2005, Tocardo has an unbeaten track record of continuous tidal power production for nine years in a row. Since then it developed turbines and associated technologies, achieving 90% – 100% energy yield performance. Tocardo has 9 turbines in continual operation and has 21 patents in place. A focus on reliability, with very low operations and maintenance costs has resulted in industry leading levelised costs of energy (LCOE). Tocardo’s turbines are direct drive, i.e. without a gearbox or mechanical pitch mechanism. They have a patented, smart rotor bi-blade design, which enables it to be bi-directional with a guaranteed 20-year lifetime.
Tocardo will continue to deliver its state of the art, reliable turbines and after-sales support. It will now also be investing in additional turbine development. This will be done in partnership with QED Naval and HydroWing, who bring a combined 50 years of marine design, development and operations experience, along with their experience in foundation systems, LCOE and yield improvements. The companies have already been working in partnership on tidal projects in Europe and will be expanding on this as they further develop their complimentary technologies.

The overriding vision for this new joint venture is to harness the decades of tidal expertise within the three companies, to finesse the tried and tested turbine and foundation technologies with some novel ideas, and to really drive down costs, particularly in terms of LCOE. The partnership now aims to take their technologies and develop them at a larger scale and is currently interested in hearing from like-minded project partners. Richard Parkinson, CEO of HydroWing: “This bigger, long term, end to end vision is quite unique in that it brings an unrivalled pool of expertise and collaboration across European tidal energy. The new joint venture is committed to expand and will be introducing their combined technologies in new projects starting in 2020.” Andries Van Unen, CEO of Tocardo: “We didn’t get to this point alone. In joining all these forces together there has been some great vision, hard work and expertise. We are very grateful to all parties who have helped get this partnership over the line: namely investors, existing customers, the hard-working staff and project team. We are now in the fortunate position to have a geographically greater market presence and team with some of the most talented experts in the industry behind us which can build on the technologies and results achieved over the years. We really can’t wait to show you some of the exciting projects and innovations we are working on.” Jeremy Smith, CEO of QED Naval Ltd: “All three companies are very excited to announce this exciting recipe and European partnership which will takes the key ingredients of tidal technologies developed over the last 12 years, great turbines and foundation systems, spiced up with some of the industries great minds to deliver great value reliable tidal solutions.”