Welcome to The Crown Estate
Working with us
We take a highly collaborative approach to the wave and tidal sector.
Successful development of wave and tidal energy is likely to require considerable collaboration across industry and government. Our approach focuses on bringing together interested parties in industry, Government and elsewhere.
There is a range of opportunities for other organisations to work with us, as tenants for wave or tidal project sites, contractors for our work on enabling actions or in other capacities.
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Leasing to date
The Crown Estate has been leasing sites for wave and tidal projects for over a decade, starting with early installations such as the Marine Current Turbines prototype off Lynmouth, Devon.
We have provided seabed rights for a number of managed test and demonstration facilitates, including the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC, Orkney) and Wave Hub (Cornwall), plus other sites for single prototypes and arrays of generation devices. We have also provided rights for development of commercial-scale projects of potential capacities between several tens and several hundreds of megawatts.
Between 2008 and 2010, we ran the Pentland Firth and Orkney waters wave and tidal leasing round (north Scotland). This led to the award of rights for eleven projects with a total potential capacity of 1,600 MW. Over 2011 and 2012, we conducted a leasing round for tidal projects in the Rathlin Island and Torr Head strategic area (Northern Ireland), which resulted in two projects with 200 MW total potential capacity.
For more information please visit:
Pentland Firth and Orkney waters wave and tidal leasing round
From 2010 to 2012, we ran a process to lease sites for engineering testing, demonstration arrays and additional managed test facilities - plus in Scotland, small commercial projects (up to 30 MW potential capacity) in connection with the Scottish Government's Saltire Prize. The process involved four, six-month application windows and developers identified sites in various places in UK territorial waters.
Details of all projects leased to date are available in the Our portfolio section:
Wave and Tidal Knowledge Network
Collaboration is important for industry growth. Turning new technologies into commercial generation assets is needs specialist input spanning multiple disciplines which is often beyond the ability of any single organisation.
To this aim we have developed the Wave and Tidal Knowledge Network to facilitate the exchange of data.
Get in touch
Useful documents - Wave and tidal
- MOU with the University of Highlands and Islands (PDF, 241 KB)
- Pentland Firth and Orkney waters strategic area review project (2012) (PDF, 712 KB)
- The Crown Estate industry engagement exercise (PDF, 488 KB)
- The Crown Estate role in offshore renewable energy (PDF, 169 KB)
- UK wave and tidal key resource areas project – summary report (PDF, 600 KB)