“uåX˜äŠÊ˜·³Ç

The down-wind turbines should be installed in 2016, if planning is approved.

Dutch firm 2-B, founded in 2007, has received funding from the Scottish Investment Bank as well as £2.7 million from Department for Energy and Climate Change (Decc) with backing from equity investors.

It also has arranged to build a full-scale onshore prototype now fully under way to be installed inthe Eemshaven port area in the Netherlands in the first half of 2015 ahead of installation in Scotland the following year.

"Our main target with these project steps is to get the machine to mature and proven design – to have the full offshore bells and whistles tested if you will, before it goes into larger numbers," 2-B Energy's Chief Operations Officer Mikael Jakobsson, told “uåX˜äŠÊ˜·³Ç.

The turbine, which the company has designed, features an integrated helicopter-landing pad and a full-length "lattice-style" jacket structure.

The integrated-design extends from the seabed to the bottom of the nacelle, replacing a traditional tower-foundation combination.

"We are aiming to install a full machine within 12 hours whereas you would struggle install just the tower and the machine head within 24 hours on a normal machine," said Jakobsson, "This will dramatically shorten the time needed for an installation vessel.

"If you take a three bladed, up-wind machine and you increase the size of it, the blades get longer and inherently softer. This means that you need to get stiffness in your blades and use tilt angles and pre/bending of the blade to prevent it from hitting the tower and that also requires you to have a very slender tower. Going down wind, with a machine like this, you take pressure off that relationship," he added.

"In the future we're going to look for suitable partners or suitable investors that can come in and take the company forward to provide a successful home, meaning the substantial backing and company behind it that can take the industrialization of it forward.

"This machine with its design choices and conceptual areas of innovation is actually fairly close to commercial deployment. I think that even after the first demonstration, we will quite quickly mark off these conceptual "tick-boxes" and people will see this actually works."