News / Marine power needs major investment
THE MUCH talked about revolution in marine renewable energy is still many years away and would need significant investment to be fully unleashed, according to industry experts meeting in Lerwick last week.
Shetland Islands Council, keen to position itself at the heart of this emerging industry, hosted a general industry panel meeting behind closed doors to hear how the isles’ energy-laden tides and waves could be utilised to satisfy the nation’s hunger for affordable power.
For many years the council has watched with envy as neighbouring Orkney started its liaison with the then tiny marine renewable industry more than 20 years ago. Today its marine renewables research and development industry supports around 100 jobs.
The waters around Orkney and the Pentland Firth have now been designated for a range of different tidal and wave energy projects which could have a capacity of 1.6 gigawatts.
In Shetland the industry has teamed up with the local authority to form the Shetland Renewable Energy Forum overlooking the work of four sub-groups, one of which is focussing on attracting interest in harnessing tidal and wave energy in local waters.
Back in 2009 a consortium of Pelamis Wave Energy and Swedish utility Vattenfall announced plans for a 10 to 20 megawatt wave farm to the west of Shetland. That project is dependent on the interconnector, associated with the Viking Energy wind farm project.
Pelamis project manager Max Carcas said that as the next step in the project a wave testing buoy would be deployed about 5.5 miles off Burra within the next month or two.
He added that Pelamis was working on the basis that the interconnector would be laid in 2014/15, by which time the project should be ready to be deployed.
Visiting from Orkney Islands Council, Lucy Parsons said the islands could “in theory” have projects with a capacity of 60 megawatts in the water by 2016, but that would depend on a range of variables, such as grid connection, licences and, most importantly, funding.
“The big gap at the moment is the £3 billion of funding missing for commercialisation,” she said.
“So far not that much money has been invested in the sector. It usually is being announced several times, but the actual money that turns up in order to enable these things is a lot less than the amounts that are being announced.”
Echoing her sentiments on the theme of funding, Mr Carcas said the whole sector had come a long way with very limited funding.
“The amount invested in wave and tidal energy over the last decade amounts to probably about £30 million, half of which was about last year. Compare that with the £1 billion the Danes invested in wind power, or what we as a country invested into nuclear in the 25 years up to 1998.”
He added that all these projects were still at the research and development stage, but expressed his hope that some of them should reach commercial maturity by the turn of the century.
“To create a new energy technology is not an easy task. There has never been a new energy technology that was economically out of the box.
“The ambition for wave energy is to potentially supply a fifth of UK electricity, which would be equivalent to the existing nuclear sector,
“How long will it take to get there? That is a question of how much priority and how much investment we put on it now, and what we are doing in the intervening period. I would hope that we would get to the first substantial deployment, the first gigawatt, within a decade.
“We missed the boat on wind, but we believe there is a good opportunity here for us on marine,” he said.
Ends
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