BBC, more UK Press: Brits’ Crown Estate leases Scottish seas for wave & tide energy. Uh…. y’mean those contraptions actually work?
On reading this burst of news from Scotland on “marine power” one wonders – where’s the perspective, the hey waitaminute, the… (pardon the expression).. the other side?
Wave energy is a lot like fusion. Fans of both look to the ocean, for one thing. Fusion advocates like to say all we need is the deuterium from seawater and we’ll power the planet. Wave and tidal energy boosters say, well, look how wavy the ocean is and how effortlessly it tosses boats about and lifts them with its tides. Let’s put it to work! But there is, speaking of work, another way they are alike. Both get lots of positive press and public endorsement. Neither is a mainstay in powering any grids that I know of. Which is to say: does it work?
Thus the perplexion in this corner on reading BBC‘s no-nonsense dispatch today: ‘Milestone’ for wave energy plans. The Crown Estate, one supposes, by historic mandate manages the sovereign’s property for profit and conservation (ie for Queen Elizabeth). It in practice works more like the US Bureau of Land Management moshed with the Minerals Management Service and runs the property for the public purse. This week it revealed the successful bidders to lease ten near-shore sites off Scotland and the Orkneys for tidal and wave power. Along with the written BBC dispatch is this dockside video report by David Shukman showing one of the devices, a monster floating snake thing, that is to be deployed in the suddenly more friendly-looking, angry sea. The report demonstrates how, without fossil fuels, the device will work. But not whether it has worked yet and made money at the same time.
The CE projects some 1.2 gigawatts of power from the overall initiative. That’s a bunch - enough, it says here, for 750,000 homes.
In all likelihood the Brit press has been covering the technology and I just missed it. This lease sale has been in the works for a few years. The lease winners have some serious money and heavy hardware. But I am sitting here unable to recall any large scale demonstration of practical wave power, and precious little on tidal power as well. Yet the BBC’s account treats this lease sale with as little skepticism – or even an aside on the iffy character of the technology – as it would a lease sale for something as routinely established as offshore oil drilling.
Certainly a lot of work is going into this. Those big wave-harvesting flapper pumps up there on top are huge and real. They are from one of the winners, Aquamarine Power Ltd. To gauge their size check the site where I found that one, and the pics of the real things in the fabrication bay. The snakelike one is from a company calledPelamis Wave Power.
Other Stories, mostly UK press:
- Bloomberg via Business Week – Rodney Jefferson, Alex Morales: Scottish Power, Pelamis Win Marine Energy Contracts ; Just a morsel of caution offered in this: “The technologies are still largely at a demonstration stage…”
- Telegraph – Simon Johnson : World first wave and tidal energy projects for Scotland ; A bit more caution here from the paper’s political editor; the power, engineers say, will be very expensive, and the machinery is still, in most cases, in development.
- The Scottish Sun – Andrew Nicoll: Scotland rules the waves ; Another by a political writer. In the lede – “..could be the first stage in Scotland becoming a green energy superpower…” . No doubts evinced in this piece.
- Wall St. Journal – Selina Williams (filed from London): U.K. Tries to Catch a Wave ; She calls it wave and tidal power a key green technology. Interesting fact here, thrown out without elaboration however: UK now has 2.4 megawatts of installed wave and tidal power. That is a fifth of one percent of what this single lease sale supposedly will yield by 2020.
- Financial Times – Andrew Bolder: Salmond hails wave of energy deals ; The phrase “Saudi Arabia of marine power’ comes up here and in some other accounts. It is very difficult to know whether that means anything – how hard would it be to compare the annual energy, at best, this development will produce compared to the energy content of one year of oil from the Saudis? It cannot be much. Plus – should not the comparison be with coal, not oil?
- Herald Scotland – David Ross : Scotland is set to realize potential as ‘Saudi Arabia of marine power‘ ; All booster, neither eyebrow cocked.
A bit of background, written again without cynicism or skepticism:
- Renewable Energy World – Roger Bedard: Ocean/Tidal/Stream Power: The Road to Commercialization ;
Grist for the Mill:
Crown Estate Press Release ; Pelamis Wave Power Press Release ; Aquamarine Power Press Release ; Marine Current Turbines Press Release ; ScottishPower Renewables Press Release ; SSE Renewables/Open Hydro Press Release ;
- Charlie Petit
