New York City’s East River Now Home to 3 Tidal Power Turbines

(Credit: Verdant Power)

An array of three tidal power turbines are now in operations at New York’s Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy (RITE) Project site in the East River. The deployment came as the first US licensed tidal power project. Verdant Power, a marine renewable energy (MRE) company, installed the turbines.

The RITE Project activity is a technology demonstration of Verdant Power’s fifth-generation tidal power system and its novel TriFrame mounting system. The system is designed to optimize the economics of installation and maintenance over the system’s 20-year life, and to prove performance. This design provides for readily scalable systems to larger sizes for deeper and faster tidal straits.

The RITE Project, as a grid-connected array of tidal power turbines, provides the metrics for system performance, and operational costs which are scalable to other sites, and demonstrates an MRE project as distributed generation for alternative global market opportunities.

The RITE Project will generate electricity under a pilot project license issued by the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission – the first commercial license for a tidal power project in America. The project will provide clean electricity to Roosevelt Island through a distributed generation connection to Con Edison’s local grid and is supported by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and the US Department of Energy, in addition to New York private equity investors.