Sweden's Minesto Completes 48-Hour Maintenance on Tidal Energy Unit and Resumes Power Generation

en.Wedoany.com Reported - On October 15, Swedish marine energy company Minesto announced that its Dragon 4 tidal energy generator deployed in the Vestmannasund Strait of the Faroe Islands completed a rapid maintenance operation, taking only 48 hours from offshore recovery to redeployment for power generation, setting the company's shortest complete maintenance turnaround record to date. The maintenance involved inspections of the upgraded generator that had been operating for 10 weeks, and included equipment disassembly and reassembly, repair, quality inspection, and functional verification. The maintenance work was scheduled during periods of lower tidal power generation to reduce power loss caused by downtime.

The maintenance was carried out by Minesto in collaboration with local marine engineering contractor SJH Offshore. Workers first recovered the underwater power generation device to shore, removed the nacelle, inspected the upgraded generator, and completed the relevant maintenance work. The equipment was then reassembled, and after quality and functional checks, redeployed offshore. Minesto employs a maintenance design with replaceable nacelles and other subsystem modules, allowing longer-cycle equipment inspections, repairs, and upgrades to be carried out onshore using spare modules.

The Dragon 4 has a rated power of 100 kW and is a tidal energy generation device developed by Minesto for microgrid power supply scenarios. On March 17, 2026, the company confirmed that the unit had been connected to the grid in the Faroe Islands and was generating power, providing operational data for a microgrid project partially funded by the Swedish Energy Agency. The equipment involved in this maintenance uses an upgraded Power Take-Off (PTO) system, which was developed by Minesto specifically for the actual tidal conditions of the Vestmannasund Strait.

On August 10, 2026, Minesto published summer operating data for the upgraded unit, confirming that the new PTO system improved power output under varying tidal flow conditions. The company compared daily power generation before and after the upgrade, using the same Dragon 4 device for testing, with the main hardware change being the Power Take-Off system. The upgraded unit completed power generation performance verification during several months of continuous operation, and this maintenance further completed the maintenance turnaround test for the upgraded equipment.

Since 2020, Minesto has continuously carried out offshore installation, recovery, and maintenance operations for Dragon series tidal energy generation devices in the Faroe Islands. The related operational work involves adjustments to equipment structure, control systems, offshore operational tools, and onshore logistics processes. The company's Chief Technology Officer Bernt Erik Westre stated that Minesto and SJH Offshore have refined the maintenance procedures through multiple rounds of offshore operations, and plan to apply the relevant operational methods to subsequent multi-unit deployments.