Cambridge marine start-up Green-Tide Turbines has lined up £20 million potential investment in Brazil.

CEO Michael Evans has just returned from Brazil and exclusively revealed to Business Weekly that the reception for GTT’s technology had crystalised the young company’s strategy.

He told me: “I had to pinch myself on the flight home to check if it was all a dream!

“Three independent offers of potential investment of £20m from three of the biggest energy companies in the world, a couple of JV opportunities and offers of free R & D at the University of Rio de Janeiro. That’s not a bad return.

“I emphasise at this stage the ‘potential’ nature of these opportunities because we are not the kind of business that wants to set expectations too high. That said, securing three ‘potential’ competing offers is quite an achievement.

“Brazil is developing at an astonishing rate with massive infrastructure being installed. European markets can’t compete when it comes to opportunities for companies like ours.

“It’s early days but BRIC markets – Brazil, Russia, India and China – look like where we are heading.”

GTT recently won £100,000 from EEDA to develop its novel technology for generating energy from tidal power.

Green-Tide, which is in Business Weekly’s elite ‘Killer50’ and also in the running for our Business Awards ‘Killer technologies’ honours on March 24, is trialling the technology in small streams in the East of England but is targeting some of the world’s most iconic waterways and coastlines – including the Amazon.

Long term, Green-Tide’s technology could revolutionise the quality of life for people living in some of the remotest communities on the planet.

The EEDA grant will help Green-Tide develop a revolutionary method of generating energy from tidal power that is more efficient and cheaper to operate than existing technology.

Based at IdeaSpace in Cambridge University’s Hauser Forum, the company’s turbine technology can be adapted to serve remote communities in developing countries – where the cost of extending electricity infrastructure or supplying fuel is simply not affordable – by generating 2-5kW of vital power supply from nearby rivers.

The same technology can also be applied to larger expanses of water, generating 500kW of tidal energy from a turbine approximately 10m in diameter, helping developed countries to reduce their carbon footprint.

By 2014, the Cambridge company hopes to see its ‘Tidal Turbine’ technology installed across the UK coastline, with its smaller run-of-river turbines installed in iconic rivers such as the Amazon, Yangtze and Ganges by 2012