Tidal energy belongs to the class of intermittent but predictable renewable energy
sources. In this paper, we consider a compact set of geographically diverse locations, which
have been assessed to have significant tidal stream energy, and attempt to find the degree to
which the resource in each location should be exploited so that the aggregate power from all
locations has a low variance. An important characteristic of the locations chosen is that there
is a good spread in the peak tidal flow times, though the geographical spread is relatively
small. We assume that the locations, all on the island of Ireland, can be connected together
and also assume a modular set of tidal turbines. We employ multi-objective optimisation to
simultaneously minimise variance, maximise mean power and maximise minimum power.
A Pareto front of optimal solutions in the form of a set of coefficients determining the degree
of tidal energy penetration in each location is generated using a genetic algorithm. While
for the example chosen the total mean power generated is not great (circa 100 MW), the
case study demonstrated a methodology that can be applied to other location sets that exhibit
similar delays between peak tidal flow times
