Renewable marine energy from tides is a major potential growth industry for the Atlantic area. There is a barrier to growth due to uncertainty in the engineering design, resulting in technology that is too expensive and risky to attract financial investment. Our project will investigate the forces acting on the blades and structures of tidal energy converters (TECs), and their impact on reliability. This investigation will be carried out in an iterative fashion, and will incorporate simulations, laboratory tests and testing at sea. The impact of our project will be better quantification of technical risk to TEC developers, and more robust TEC designs. This will allow lower engineering safety factors, thus lowering cost while also improving reliability. The partners will identify critical parameters for the blades and support structure, allowing us to design a monitoring system for the specific devices used in the investigation. From this we will develop a generalised monitoring system that can be applied to any TEC design. This system will lower the risk of TEC development, improve reliability, and thereby increase capacity factor (ie, power generated as a proportion of theoretical capacity) and lower CAPEX/OPEX. This will foster the growth of the tidal energy sector.