San Bernardino ocean power project

With more than 7,000 islands and current streams unanimously recognized among the strongest on the planet, the Filipino archipel is the ideal playground for the deployment of tidal stream power projects, in line with the insular energetic model promoted by SABELLA.

On October 31, 2013, the Department of Energy awarded four leases to H&WB Asia Pacific, a energy project development company in the Philippines, for ocean energy harnessing, three of them being located in the San Bernardino Strait.

In October 2015, after a thorough technical review, H&WB and SABELLA signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) for the joint development of tidal power projects on three of the concessions owned by H&WB. Thus, the San Bernardino ocean power project is an innovative and transformative initiative carried out by San Bernardino Ocean Power Corp., which is owned by H&WB Corp. and SABELLA SAS, to develop the Philippines’ and the ASEAN region’s first commercial ocean power plant deploying tidal in-stream turbines. The first phase of the project aims to develop a 1,5 MW demonstration-scale tidal power plant, which will reduce the dependency of Capul, an off-grid island in San Bernardino Strait currently relying on costly and polluting diesel generators.

Technologies used

The ocean power plant will be equipped with “D20-500” marine current turbines, designed and built by SABELLA Each turbine is a 20 meter rotor diameter device with a 500 kW rated power output. D20-500 is based on technological concepts tried and tested in operating conditions with D03 and D10 trials, which, henceforth, constitutes the differentiating drivers of SABELLA’s design, some of them protected by the appropriated patents:

• a horizontal axis rotor with fixed symmetrical blades and no yaw drive.
• a direct drive permanent magnet synchronous generator;
• an in-board conversion and transformation system;
• a gravity-based tripod foundation;
• a modular architecture dissociating the dynamic stability (tripod) and the energy production (nacelle and rotor) functions into two independent parts ingeniously inserted in a cone-shaped mast without mechanical fixture.

Simplicity, reliability, and ruggedness are the cornerstones of SABELLA’s technological choices.