by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Leaders of the UK wave & tidal power sector meeting in Bath recently at the world’s largest ever marine energy conference have backed Government plans to scope English & Welsh waters for new sites.
The plans were announced by Climate Change Minister, Lord Hunt at the BWEA’s Wave & Tidal 09 conference, attended by 500 delegates from around the world. The UK is a leader in the development of this emerging green technology.
Conference Chairman Alan Moore welcomed the proposals: “This announcement is great news for an industry which is a growing UK success story. It will open Britain ’s coastline and estuaries to clean, green energy that will help power a low carbon economy.”
The Govt is launching a screening exercise to study the potential for wave & tidal stream and tidal range technology around the coast. This is the first step to running a full marine energy Strategic Environmental Assessment for England and Wales .”
Lord Hunt said: “The screening exercise in English and Welsh waters is a significant step forward in our plans to harness the power of our seas and secure a renewable and low carbon energy supply.”
The move follows close on the heels of the Budget, which allocated £405 million to emerging low carbon technology manufacturing such as wave & tidal.
Last year saw a series of commercial firsts for the industry:
Marine Current Turbines deployment of a commercial tidal scheme, SeaGen, in Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland;
UK based Pelamis Wavepower deploying the first ever commercial wave array in Portugal;
OpenHydro had the first fullscale test at the European Marine Energy centre (EMEC) in Orkney, and
the Crown Estate made the first ever call for commercial projects in the Pentland Firth.
These developments have helped secure the UK ’s place as a world leader in marine renewables.
Alan Moore added: “ Britain is in pole-position to harness our natural wave & tidal resources, which across the world could potentially meet up to 20% of our energy needs and build a thriving manufacturing industry here in the UK in the process.”
With a country such as Britain, surrounded by seas, and some of them with strong currents, there surely must be a scope for wave, tidal and current power generation.
In addition to that, especially if some form of micro-generation is employed, other water sources and water courses too could be utilized on the mainland. Burns, becks, streams and rivers can have water wheels and turbines set in that also could produce a fair amount of energy. It has been done before.
The problem appears to be, however, that we are looking far too much and often at huge projects rather than at small ones that could power a village or a town subdivision or such.
We must get a lot more inventive to secure our energy needs and, above all, we must stop being as wasteful as we are and conserve and reduce consumption.
When it comes to micro-generation for running properties and even small businesses off-grid, do we really have to have 240VAC or 117VAC or such? We do not.
Much of it could be accomplished with the use of 12VDC, for instance, for most appliances do what and have what? They have power supplies – transformers – that take the mains voltage and reduce that down to 12VDC, 9VDC, or lower still.
This is something that should be looked at, especially, as said, for micro-generation on off-grid properties and such. But I digressed a little and this shall be it.
© 2009
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Wave & tidal industry backs Government search for new underwater sites
