Marine Renewables
As the nation seeks to address global warming issues through the increased adoption of renewable energy technologies, Orkney is at the forefront of the development and testing of marine devices. The European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) is providing both a national and international focus for the development and testing of tidal and wave energy devices.
This focus of this exciting development has led to Currie Brothers diversifying its capabilities to support the use of marine resources for power generation. This has been made possible as a result of having a skilled workforce with the capabilities to address some of the key construction challenges. 
These construction challenges have included:
Open Hydro’s placing of the first marine tidal turbine in Orkney waters, where we made a significant contribution using our skilled workforce and steel fabrication workshop.
Tidal Generation Ltd and KML, for whom we were able to provide a workforce bringing a wide range of skills including welding, mechanical, plant operators and more general construction labour.
Voith - assisting them on a current project locally.
Fendercare - assisting them with various projects throughout Orkney.
EMEC - supply of steel chassis with densocrete ballast blocks for gravity based anchor moorings for their nursery sites for wave and tidal energy machines. These were built to DNV standards.
Case Study
Marine Renewables
Orkney is leading the world in supporting the development of marine and tidal renewable energy devices, through its European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC). EMEC offers developers the opportunity to test full scale prototype devices in unrivalled wave and tidal conditions with the ability to connect to the electricity supply grid. However, one of the challenges faced by all marine renewable devices is ensuring that they are fixed or moored to the sea bed. As a result there is an associated need to be able to fabricate appropriate structures for anchoring the devices to the sea bed. This is where we at Currie Brothers can help based on our ability to cast and fabricate concrete structures at our nearby site in Hatston.
We have worked both with EMEC and other companies associated with the marine renewables sector including Voith Hydro, Bauer Renewables and Open Hydro to develop moulds for novel structures. Not only do we have experience with normal concrete ballast materials, we have also worked with particularly dense iron-ore based materials, sourced from overseas, to fabricate sub-sea mooring structures of sufficient mass to stay fixed to the seabed.
Key to Currie Brothers selection has been our ability to fabricate, manage and store cast pre-formed structures at our one site in Hatston. We have a skilled work-force, which enables us to fabricate on-site the shuttering required to produce these structures. The weight of these structures has ranged from 6.5te to as much as 21te blocks, all of which we are able to handle and transport using our own equipment – making for simpler overall project management both for us and our clients.
Case Study
Cable Drum Transport
Large cable drum 8.5m by 8.5m, 160ton, 5000m of cable for underwater use. Moved for the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC).