Two wind turbines in the Pentland Firth, Scotland, have set a new world record for a month’s production of renewable electricity from tidal power.

Atlantis Resources announced yesterday (31 August) that their two turbines had produced 700MW hours of electricity in August – a world record and enough to power 2,000 homes.

In total, the turbines have now produced 2GW hours of electricity since their launch earlier this year. Atlantis also confirmed that a third turbine was reinstalled at the MeyGen site in recent days.

It gives hope that Atlantis will soon go on to complete Phase 1A of their £50m (~€54m) MeyGen project in its entirety, with four turbines producing 6MW of electricity possibly by the end of October.

All three turbines already in place had been recovered from the sea earlier this year for improvements to be made, and all three have been put back in the Pentland Firth and reconnected to the National Grid.

The group said the fourth and final Phase 1A turbine had experienced some minor delays in receiving upgrade components and was now expected to be reinstalled during the next neap tide in late September.

Director of project delivery at MeyGen David Taaffe said: “The production performance from the installed turbines on the MeyGen project has been very good.

“August proved to be a world record month, providing enough energy to power 2,000 Scottish homes from just two turbines.

“With yet another successful installation campaign expertly completed this week by the Atlantis operations team, we expect to continue to break records throughout the rest of the year generating both predictable power and revenue.”

The next phase of the MeyGen project has already secured a further €20m under the Horizon 2020 project as well as €17m from the NER300 project, which funds innovation in low-carbon energy production.