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Portaferry is a little village in County Down, in the Ards peninsula.
It’s made up mainly of fishermen and tradesmen.
Very, very picturesque. It’s a lovely place to live.
And we’re lucky to have the first and the biggest tidal turbine in the world.
Yeah, we grew up, and we spent all our time either in the water, or on the beach collecting crabs.
Our grandfather, he always said we could swim before we could walk.
The tide in Strangford Lough is really, really strong.
You can see the power that’s there.
Sometimes it makes our life easier, sometimes it makes our life harder.
Jeremy & Simon Rogers Maintenance engineers on SeaGen
It’s really nice to see a tidal device harnessing the power of Strangford Lough,
turning tidal energy into electric power.
When you’re on board you can actually feel the power of the tide pushing it,
and pushing the rotors round.
So it’s a fantastic experience to be on board
and to try to describe it to somebody, you really can’t. It’s something that has to be felt to really understand.
SeaGen is a wind turbine turned upside down and put in the water,
and that’s how it works.
The great part about SeaGen is the traffic – there is none.
The commute to work is absolutely wonderful. You can walk from home, walk down the quay,
Frank has the boat sitting ready for you.
Jump into the boat, a little exercise in the morning climbing the 10-metre ladder.
There’s no day that’s the same out here.
From changing gearboxes to changing tiny little sensors
tucked away in a little motor somewhere.
You never know whether you’re going to be working with a tiny screwdriver or a huge big spanner.
SeaGen is, as far as I’m aware, no longer an experiment, it’s now a UK-accredited power station.
There is only one tidal turbine working in the world, so to be involved in something that has been so successful,
it’s a great feeling.
It gets you up in the morning, I suppose that would be a way to describe it.