Abstract
In 2011 Tidal Energy Ltd (TEL) was granted the first Marine Licence for the deployment of a tidal stream turbine in Welsh waters. This License was granted with a ground breaking operating regime with respect to marine mammals, to 'deploy and monitor' rather than the more conservative protocol of suspending plant operation when mammals are present. This approach focused on the opportunity to better understand the interaction between the Marine mammals frequenting the Pembrokeshire coastline with a full scale tidal turbine. In order to satisfy this need for better understanding, TEL required a change in approach to the technology development of the DeltaStreamTM prototype device. Instead of the environmental monitoring packages being an afterthought to the overall Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system (SCADA), it was considered from the very outset of the project to be a fully integrated component of the system. The extensive marine mammal monitoring package developed by TEL includes a number of developmental scientific technologies that required integration with the more standard industrial components for power generation. In collaboration with Applied Renewables Research Ltd (ARR Ltd) and the special equipment suppliers a highly integrated hardware and software solution was designed and implemented in order to handle the unprecedented scale of real-time data management in this field.