I was surprised to hear a couple of people speaking up in favour of wind and tidal power at the Tartan Heart Festival last weekend. I had assumed that everyone had now worked out that they were a long way from being commercially viable. Perhaps this is because of the insistence of some in the renewables sector that power from the oceans could make people lots of money. Our old friends at Bloomberg New Energy Finance were one such company, talking up prospects for the sector and explaining how the arrival of big engineering companies was changing everything.
However something else has been stirring, and that has been the interest of the engineering and industrial majors. In the last three years, Siemens, Rolls-Royce, Andritz and French naval defence company DCNS have bought minority or controlling takes in the tidal device makers Marine Current Turbines, Tidal Generation, Hammerfest Strom and OpenHydro respectively – while ABB and Alstom have done similar with wave energy specialists Aquamarine Power and AWS Ocean Energy.
As Neil Kermode, managing director of the European Marine Energy Centre, host of the three wave devices at Billia Croo and three tidal machines off another Orkney island, puts it in an interview in our weekly newsletter, Clean Energy & Carbon Brief: “These companies don’t have to do this, but they want to – and that is hugely important recognition that this sector has moved far beyond the man-in-a-shed businesses.
How different things look a couple of years on:
Development and commercialization of marine energy technologies is “taking longer than hoped and costing more money than expected”, a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance has found.
The analysis firm has revised its 2020 global installation forecast for the sector downward to 21 MW for wave power, down 72 per cent on its previous forecast, and to 148 MW for tidal power, down 21 per cent.
This decline in interest is no doubt driven by negative sentiment about the government's willingness to maintain the warm bath of subsidies in which the crony capitalists like to wallow.