MAGALLANES: The Tide is Finally Turning
For Alejandro Marques, second generation leader at pioneering tidal technology company, Magallanes Renovables, there is a feeling of excitement in the water as its latest concept is entering commercial production. He tells Energy Focus that after years of development, inevitable success is closer than ever before.
Supported by:
Interview with Alejandro Marques, Director
There is a question that has stalked the renewable energy industry for as long as turbines have spun and solar panels have faced the sun. Wind drops. Clouds gather. Generation stops. Demand does not. The intermittency problem has driven decades of research into storage, interconnection, and every other mechanism engineers and economists have devised to smooth the gap between what nature provides and what modern society requires.
Tidal energy has always offered a different answer — not a workaround, but a solution. The tides do not stop. They do not vary by season or shift with the weather. They are the only renewable resource that is genuinely 100% predictable. The question has been whether anyone could build a machine robust enough to survive the ocean and cost-effective enough to make commercial sense. For the past 17 years, Magallanes has been answering that question.
The Spanish company was founded on a conviction — the belief of its inventor, an industrial entrepreneur, that the energy locked in tidal streams was too significant and too predictable to ignore. His son, Alejandro Marques, joined six years ago as a Director, bringing a background in law and finance to a company at an inflection point. The first prototype had proved the concept. What it needed was the commercial architecture — investors, tariffs, supply chain relationships, and structured project finance to turn a working prototype into an industry. “We are one in a thousand that has reached this position,” Marques says. Many have tried to commercialise tidal energy. Most have not made it.
The path to this point has been long and methodical. After years of smaller-scale devices and accumulated learning, Magallanes deployed a full-scale 1.5MW device at the European Marine Energy Centre in Scotland — the world’s foremost facility for testing ocean energy technology — in 2019. The prototype spent five years in the water, gathering data in real operating conditions that no laboratory environment can replicate. That knowledge informed every design decision that followed, producing the ATIR 2.0: the company’s first commercial-grade device, now under construction.
“We have designed and optimised ATIR 2.0 and we have financed the first device through project finance — the first project financed for tidal energy globally,” Marques explains. It is a milestone that extends beyond Magallanes itself. Project finance — with its due diligence requirements, its bankability tests, its long-term revenue modelling — is the mechanism through which infrastructure reaches scale. Tidal energy has now passed that test for the first time anywhere in the world.
The UK has provided much of the commercial framework that made this possible. Magallanes secured a Contract for Difference tariff covering 13.5MW — a landmark for a technology that spent years developing without knowing whether a revenue mechanism would exist when commercial deployment arrived. Projects are awarded in Scotland and Wales, and the rollout is structured with the logic of an industry in its early scaling phase: one unit first, then six, then ten more, building toward arrays of fifty or sixty devices within five or six years.
ATIR 2.0 TAKES SHAPE
What makes tidal energy compelling goes beyond its predictability, though that quality is central to the argument. The National Energy System Operator has studied tidal generation’s potential impact on Britain’s grid, finding that it can reduce wholesale energy prices, help balance the network, and deliver stable clean electricity — because it generates to a fixed schedule, not when wind happens to blow. The EU Blue Economy Report 2025 identifies ocean energy as a critical frontier for Europe’s energy future, with tidal stream technology among the most promising pathways to predictable marine generation. Against that backdrop, the technical philosophy behind the ATIR 2.0 makes sense.
Marques says that the engineering principles behind the system are perhaps not as expected for a dynamic tech company looking to build a product and an ecosystem. “At our core we are about the highest quality processes and products, and also simplicity. Any new technology must be simple enough — that doesn’t mean basic or boring, it means tapping into what already exists. Too many try to reinvent the wheel, and from an engineering perspective they are beautiful, complex, and interesting ideas, but from a practical business perspective, they do not make sense.”
The ATIR 2.0 draws on components that the wider energy industry has already validated at scale — generators, gearboxes, Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), converters, transformers, cables — sourced from some of the world’s largest specialist manufacturers. “We want to make things work and work well, and that requires cost effectiveness. In 10 years, things will inevitably be more efficient but today it must be robust, simple, and effective,” says Marques.
That supply chain philosophy has presented its own challenges. Magallanes operates with a lean core team — software developers and naval architects in-house, with around 200 people across the project when external contractors are included. Engaging major industrial suppliers on initial orders tiny by their standards has required patience. “We have asked cable manufacturers for 500m but they typically don’t take orders for less than 10,000m,” Marques notes.
“When they get to know us and they see our products and the potential in the industry, they become partners for life,” he adds. The BlueInvest programme, the EU’s dedicated funding initiative for the blue economy, has been instrumental in supporting the company through this phase — providing capital and the credibility that comes with institutional backing during the critical step between prototype and commercial unit.
The financing challenge has been the other defining difficulty. Marques is frank about the structural mismatch between a company of Magallanes’s scale and an energy industry accustomed to thinking in gigawatts and billions. “The biggest challenge is being a small company with big ambitions, and trying to tap into the market of giants. The renewable energy industry is made of very large companies, and everyone expects very large projects. No one has time for smaller projects,” he says.
The breakthrough came not just from finding a financial partner willing to back the first commercial device, but from structuring that investment to support the work still ahead. “Two years ago, it was very difficult for us to get people excited for the step between first prototype to first commercial unit. Now, we have managed to find a financial partner because we not only finance this project but also the work that is yet to come,” he adds.
THE TIDAL MOMENT
The commercial case for tidal has always rested on predictability, but as the energy system evolves, that quality is becoming more valuable. The growth of intermittent wind and solar has intensified the need for sources that can be scheduled with precision.
Tidal generates every six hours without fail, making it exceptionally well suited to hybridisation with storage — battery systems absorb generation at peak tidal flow and release it exactly when demand requires. Hydrogen integration, frequently discussed as the solution to long-duration storage for wind, faces the problem that generation can disappear for days at a time. “In our case, there is generation every six hours. It is very easy to hybridise with storage and it is available worldwide,” Marques says.
The opportunity is also strikingly open by comparison with mature renewable sectors. The best onshore wind sites are largely taken. Solar is increasingly contested. Tidal sites — coastal channels, estuaries, island passages with strong consistent flow — remain largely untouched. “In tidal, it is a very different story, there are so many areas that are empty with no applications. It is a fantastic opportunity and is like tapping into wind 40 years ago — everything is yet to be done but the wind industry has already developed a lot of the electrical components.”
This chance to make a difference is exciting for the team. “Setting a goal that seems unachievable and having an adventure on the way to achieving it, all while doing something good for the environment, is what we stand for,” Marques highlights. The company is at a point only a handful of technology developers in any generation reach: “We are at the end of the development and R&D process and right at the start of the journey of commercial activity and production.”
The renewable energy sector has waited a long time for tidal to move from promise to product. Magallanes — something of a phenomenon — is the organisation making that transition happen. The ATIR 2.0 will go into the water, others will join on the journey, and tidal energy quickly begins to look like an industry, just like solar and wind of previous decades. The tide, at long last, is coming in.