Peter Fraenkel

Peter Fraenkel is a Scottish marine engineer and a fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and of the Energy Institute. He is the inventor of SeaGen, a tidal stream turbine that generates electricity from the flow of tidal currents, and had previously been a founding partner of the renewable energy consultancy IT Power before the ideas he developed led to the founding of Marine Current Turbines, the company that built SeaGen. His work helped establish tidal stream power as a practical source of marine renewable energy rather than a purely experimental one. In 2013 Fraenkel won the Scottish government's Saltire Prize medal in recognition of his contribution to marine energy, and he later founded Gravitricity, a company developing energy storage that lowers and raises weights in disused mine shafts. He has also served as a visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh's School of Engineering.