Scotland boosts funds for marine energy

LEITH, Scotland, February 28, 2007. Funding of £13 million has been provided to nine marine power projects in Scotland.

Wave and tidal power could be as significant to Scotland as the discovery of North Sea oil, according to deputy first minister Nicol Stephen, who announced the funding for the projects. Scotland has reached its 2010 target of sourcing 18% of energy from renewables, and he now will seek advice on whether the 40% target for 2020 should be increased.

The creation of a world-leading industry of green power stations could be worth billions of pounds and create thousands of jobs, he explained. Scotland missed the chance to develop the global industry for wind turbines in the 1980s when Denmark stepped in to dominate the sector that is now worth £3 billion a year to its economy, and the right conditions must be created to allow the fledgling marine sector to flourish, he added.

“There's a great opportunity for Scotland to become the renewables powerhouse for Europe and the marine renewables capital of the world,” he says. “There is a huge potential for all of this in a global market worth billions.”

“All of this is as significant for Scotland's future and arguably more significant for the future of this planet than the discovery of oil in the North Sea,” he said in his capacity as enterprise minister at the Ocean Power Delivery facility in Leith. “We may remember being in this factory shed in the winter of 2007 for a long time; we have kick-started the marine-energy drive in Scotland.”

Last year, the Scottish Executive promised to provide £8 million to facilitate marine energy projects, but Stephen says demand had been so high that the funding was raised to £13 million. The funding will be supplemented by £500,000 to develop a testing berth at the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney.

The potential market for marine power has been estimated at £500 billion worldwide, but Max Carcas of Ocean Power Delivery says “it would be wrong to say that it's a done deal on the back of this.” The opportunity is there and, last year, global revenue for wind turbines was £10 billion and “there’s no reason why wave energy couldn't be of similar scale.”

Among the successful bidders for support are CRE Energy (£4.1 million) to use four of Ocean Power Delivery's Pelamis devices arranged as a single wave energy array; AWS Ocean Energy (£2.1 million) to design, construct, install, test and demonstrate a 500 kW Archimedes Wave Swing wave energy converter at the European Wave Energy Centre; ScotRenewables (£1.8 million) to develop the SRTT floating tidal stream energy converter; Open Hydro (£1.2 million) to install a 250 kW Open-Centre Turbine on the sea bed at EMEC's tidal site; Ocean Power Technology (£0.6 million) to develop the PowerBuoy; Aquamarine (£0.3 million) to develop Oyster devices which exploit the wave resource in near-shore locations; CleanTechCom (£0.3 million) to install two siphon pipes on Orkney; Wavegen (£0.15 million) to develop and test an advanced Wells turbine system on a wave energy project on the Western Isles; and Tidal Generation (£0.08 million) to extract a core sample of seabed from the berth area Tidal Generation's machine will occupy.

Most of the projects will take place near the EMEC in Orkney, with installation of small arrays and single devices at the wave and tidal test facilities. Devices are expected in the water this year, with full commissioning during 2008.

“Wave power is relatively unproven,” says David Gibbs of Wavegen which runs Scotland's only wave-power machine on Islay. “There are a number of different technologies in existence. It's yet to be proven which will be successful but we clearly believe we are going to be one of them.”

Scotland had been developing a wave turbine industry when government funding was cut in the 1980s, explains Jason Ormiston of Scottish Renewables. “If we don't get this right we'll miss out on an opportunity again,” he explains.

The Scottish Green Party says Scotland risks falling behind Portugal, where a 2.4 MW wave farm is nearly finished with plans to add another 20 MW.

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