Scotland is to establish a wave energy technology development body to encourage innovation in the industry.
Minister for Business, Energy and Tourism Fergus Ewing said ‘Wave Energy Scotland’ will bring together the best engineering and academic minds to collaborate in a research and development programme to accelerate wave technology further.
The Minister will provide more detail on Wave Energy Scotland during a Parliamentary statement on marine energy which he plans to make this week.
The Scottish Government said that it recognised that early stage technologies, such as wave energy, can take time to flourish. However, the development of wave energy has also been hampered by the uncertainty facing the energy sector more widely, following “the lengthy and delayed changes” to the electricity market resulting from the UK Government’s Electricity Market Reform process.
The Scottish Government said that given this uncertainty, it was not surprising that investors are presently reluctant to commit to higher risk marine technologies. In spite of generous support for the sector from the Scottish Government, the lack of private capital has seriously hampered the progress of both wave and tidal energy developers.
Fergus Ewing said:
“With the extraordinary ocean energy resources off Scotland’s coasts, our belief in the future success of wave energy is undiminished.
“Now is the right time to consider the future of our support for wave energy in Scotland. This is a young industry and we still have a lot of learning to do in marine renewables.
“We want to encourage further innovation in wave energy development and we recognise the need for a bold new approach to supporting this emerging technology. There is also a lack of design convergence in wave energy with many different concepts in development, while tidal appears to be converging on a front-runner design.
“This means that while the tidal energy sector is ready to build array demonstration projects – the MeyGen project in the Pentland Firth is one such example – the wave energy sector must evolve further to gain the confidence of investors.”
The tidal energy sector is at a different stage from wave energy with full scale arrays already being developed. The world’s largest tidal stream array – the MeyGen project - will shortly be deployed in Scottish waters.
The MeyGen project is described as the largest planned tidal stream development. Currently, what is funded is the first phase (four turbines). This first phase has a development cost of £51 million, of which the Scottish Government has contributed £20.5 million. If the demonstration phase is successful, then there will be further phases of development, up to 398 megawatts.
Tidal energy offers significant economic potential – it is estimated that the sector could be worth a potential £4.5 billion GVA by 2030.
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