Extracts from the Sept-October 2001 edition of Renew
These extracts only represent about 25% of it

8. Full speed ahead for Wave and Tidal?

‘Given the UK’s abundant natural wave and tidal resource, it is extremely regrettable and surprising that the development of wave and tidal energy technologies has received so little support from the Government’. That was one of the main conclusions in the report on wave and tidal power produced by the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee.

As we noted in Renew 132, it recommended a major expansion of effort- and this view seems to have gained political acceptance. Certainly, when he was interviewed by the Committee, Peter Hain, then Energy Minister, was very enthusiastic about the prospects for wave and tidal current technology. He said he would make it one of his top priorities, particularly in relation to trying to remove the obstacles to development, not least in terms of the cost of making grid connections.

For example, the Committee had heard that Wavegen has been quoted £0.5 million for its LIMPET device on Islay to be connected fully to the grid (only part could be connected since they couldn’t afford this amount) and Ocean Power’s Pelamis device, which is due to be installed, is facing a bill of £1 million to be connected. Hain replied that he ‘would not want to see any successful renewable project, least of all wave power or tidal stream power, founder because of the cost of a cable’.

As usual, the minutes of evidence taken at the hearings make fascinating reading- with one of the stars of the show clearly being Prof. Stephen Salter from Edinburgh University. He reviewed the past history of the UK wave programme in typically colourful terms. Looking back to the start in the 1970’s he said that ‘we were told to design for an enormous installation of 2,000 megawatts, two really big power stations, and this would be like telling Blériot that he had to do a fleet of Boeing 707’s; and, to our shame, we fell for it’.

He also relayed his interpretation of why this trap, if that’s what it was, was laid, reporting on ‘unwise remarks’ overheard in the gentlemen’s lavatory of the Randolph Hotel allegedly from two very senior people in the British energy establishment very early in the wave programme. One allegedly said "How much is it going to cost to kill this?", and the answer was: "It’s going to be £50 million to stop wave energy".

Salter added ‘It has always been the case that existing industries want to stifle the things that are going to challenge them. The canal owners did everything they possibly could to stop railways; and the railways then did everything they could possibly do to stop road transport. When the first electricity was generated, by Ferranti, they were prevented from transmitting electricity across a parish boundary, by a decision by the Board of Trade’.

Although not suggesting any conspiracy in this particular case, he also reported (in his written evidence) that, due to funding difficulties at Edinburgh University, his wave test tank has now to be closed- to make way for a new building for which research funding (for unrelated work) had been made available- an offer the University could not refuse.

Salter was not the only one with a sad tale to tell. Dr Alan Wells from Wavegen gave an interesting nuclear twist to the story of the Osprey I near shore 2MW device, which was damaged in 1995 in a surprise mid summer storm, before it could be fully ballasted off the coast at Dounreay. ‘The unballasted structure buckled and broke its back on the remaining humps. After the swell had subsided decision was taken and implemented to retrieve the turbo generators. The loss report was accepted without reservation by the insurers, on the basis of "perils of the sea". They compensated in full but removal of the wreck required by the Crown Commission, required the sourcing of a large Dutch jack up crane barge and this operation cost more than the Osprey prototype. Costs were also inflated by the discovery of irradiated metal particles on the structure from seabed contamination. The associated procedures and diving equipment needed for handling this contamination risk more than doubled the budget’.

However he went on ‘The project provided valuable lessons for the development of future marine renewable energy projects’ and certainly Wavegens very successful shore mounted LIMPET device, supported by a contract under the Scottish Renewable Order, is now a show-case for wave power.

The other two SRO supported wave projects were also coming along. In his evidence to the committee Dr Richard Yemms, said that Ocean Power Delivery’s Pelamis articulated ‘sea snake’ design should be ready by ‘mid- 2002’. Sea Power International was also doing well with its Floating Wave Power Plant. In their written evidence they said, that this should allow for ‘the capture of the higher energy waves found offshore, and negating the need for natural shore features or expensive civil engineering works’.

The estimated starting date for production was October 2002 at a projected cost of £2.6m and Sea Power said that, as a follow up, it was seeking to start a ‘centre of technical and manufacturing expertise of wave power technology with its five year expansion programme to produce a further 29 plants’.

It also plans ‘to bring hydrogen-producing units online, to begin to meet the demand for the clean production of gas from rapidly advancing fuel cell technology, currently being spearheaded by companies such as BMW and Mercedes’. It added that its involvement in the production of hydrogen was ‘attracting special interest as our floating platform can be looked upon as an ever-producing gas field and with the capacity to store the fuel produced on-board until unloaded into a gas tanker’.

Sea Power wants, as a first step, to convert the original FWPV plant (currently moored in the Gothenburg harbour) into a hydrogen-producing unit. This would take place within the framework of a UK LINK project together with St Andrews University in Scotland. Sea Power estimates that in five years, ‘it would be possible to have five FWPVHY plants commissioned. These would each deliver 1,340,000m3 of hydrogen, which should be measured against the fact that a single car fuelled by hydrogen will need approximately 4,500m3 per year. This equates to one plant supplying in the vicinity of 230 cars yearly consumption of hydrogen’.

What about tidal current technology? Interestingly, Salter, he who has also been developing his own tidal device, saw tidal current systems as likely to develop more rapidly than wave technology, despite the formers earlier start. ‘I think the uncertainties about tidal streams are lower, I think they can take a lot of technology from wind, and I think they are a more predictable environment; so I would expect that would reach commercial viability sooner than wave energy. The problem is that it is not such a large resource, and we can use all of it and still want more, whereas wave energy is such a big resource that it is worth going for, even if it looks hard to start with’.

Environmental impacts were one of the issues looked at by the Committee and in general both tidal current and wave systems got a clean bill of health from most of the organisations that submitted evidence on this topic. Prof. Peter Fraenkel from IT Power, who has set up Marine Current Turbines Ltd. to develop his pile mounted tidal rotor, described progress with their plan install a 300 kW prototype off Lynmouth in Devon. We are glad to report that subsequently, in June, the DTI agreed to provide £1m to match the 1m euros already promised by the EC for this exciting project. Back in March, Fraenkel told the Select Committee that ‘it is quite a complicated location because the coastline there is a national park and it is also a Site of Special Scientific Interest, so we just about picked one of the most complicated places to try and do something. We have agreement in principle from all the regulatory authorities involved, we have had on-site discussions and we have done site surveys. It is quite a major task. For example, we are being expected by the DETR to do a fairly extensive environmental impact study which is going to cost us £30 to £40,000, which is quite a lot of money for a small company. We are partly the victim of being a pioneer’.

He added ‘It is always a problem if you are the first one because you are under much more suspicion than anybody else. We are getting a lot of sympathy from the locals and we are aiming, assuming we can go ahead on schedule, to have public meetings to make sure there are not the kind of worries or misunderstandings which have occurred in relation to wind energy. So it is worth making the point that the initial hurdles are tricky and heavy and they happen at a time when you are least able to cope’.

He was quite optimistic on costs. ‘With our base line model, which is a 30 MW installation, we estimate about 3.8p/per kilowatt hour when it goes commercial’, although, he added, the consultants appointed to monitor the project, Binnie, Black and Veatch, had come out with 4.3p/kWh, ‘we are not very far apart on that’.

He went on ‘For the very first machines it is very scale-dependent, and obviously with a single one-off 1 MW machine we are looking at something like 7p/ kWh’. That interestingly is roughly the contracted price for Pelamis sea snake wave device. Richard Yemms, its inventor, noted that the contracted SRO price was ‘just under 7p per kilowatt hour, under half what the original contracted price for wind was at the start of its life’. And, he added, looking ahead, ‘assuming no major changes in technology, only economies of scale’ it could fall to ‘under 3p per kilowatt hour, at a 15 per cent discount rate by 2010. If we make the advances we expect to make in terms of control optimisation, and here wave is unique in its ability to offer very grand increases in generated energy from the same piece of equipment just through control, then we expect the cost of energy to fall down to a limit somewhere below 2p per kilowatt hour’.

The RV Power Company claimed that their RV venturi tidal current device (see Renew 132), developed at Imperial College, could also do well. In their written submission, they estimated that they should be able to produce power ‘at between two and ten pence per kWh, with the most viable sites clustering around two pence or three pence per kWh. The greatest uncertainties in our costings come from site-specific issues, marine civil engineering estimates and planning permission’.

No such problem now face the LIMPET, now in operation on Islay. Alan Thomson from Wavegen reported that the LIMPET currently generated under its SRO contract at 5.95p/kWh and added ‘with our new technologies, which should be in the water in the next two years ,that price should come below 3p’.

That’s well below the official estimates relayed to the committee, which assumed that prices for wave and tidal might be between 4-8p/kWh, so the prospects are certainly looking good. What is now needed is proper funding. The Committee heard about the current low level of UK government funding, which amounts to around £3m, mostly for wave- although, as noted earlier, an extra £1m has now be provided for IT Power.

Greenpeace in its evidence talked of their being a need for more like £50m to create a ‘critical mass’ for lift off. It also claimed that without proper support some of the companies active at present might go elsewhere, a claim only partly supported by Yemms and Thomson. Yemms commented ‘I believe firmly and have always believed that wave energy is a tremendous UK opportunity because of the mix of skill base, the technology base and the resource. If, however, there are not clear signs to us- and by clear signs I mean an element of market pull, an element of technology banding, an element of specific support for the specific needs of wave energy- but those are offered elsewhere, you would have to have very strong reasons to stay in one place. I think we can operate from here and test elsewhere, but we have to go where the support is’. Thomson was even less forthcoming ‘We are unlikely to move out of the UK but if there were facilities available in Portugal for testing, we would take advantage of them’.

However, in its written submission, the Engineering Business, a company which has developed ideas for undersea tidal current devices, has evidently begun to have concerns about the future. It reported that ‘at a board meeting in January it was decided that EB could no longer justify further investment in TS-ROPG without a clear inflow of funds to support the development’.

A proposal has however been made to ETSU for part funding for a £1.35m development programme for a 150kW version of its Stingray sea bed mounted design. Longer term, if support was forthcoming, EB said that it believed that it was realistic to plan for a ten year tidal current programme ‘leading to an installed generating capacity of 1000 MW.’

In addition to tidal current devices there is also the impounded offshore tidal reservoir concept proposed by the US company Tidal Electric (TE). Although, like a barrage, it would involve the creation of a head of water, it would not involve blocking off an estuary and so should have lower environmental impact. In its written evidence the company outlined it three proposed projects off the coast of Wales. Their submissions reported that an agreement had been reached with AES Electrical under which a 30 MW tidal power project will be developed near Fifoots Point in the Bristol Channel of the Severn Estuary. AES owns a 360 MW coal-fired power station at Fifoots Point and the two power plants would share management staff, facilities, and a 400 MW grid connection. After the completion of engineering studies, a Planning Application would be submitted to the DTI, with approval hoped for ‘within six to 18 months’, whereupon construction could commence. That was estimated to take about two years, so that ‘the Fifoots Tidal Power Project could be in service in mid-2004, but a more conservative would be 2005’.

In addition there was a proposal for a 30MW Swansea Bay Tidal Power Plant being considered in co-operation with the Environment Trust, and also a much larger 423MW North Wales Tidal Power Project. The company said it had been working with ‘a consortium of political and environmental groups in North Wales in order to identify and conceptualise a tidal power project that will be configured in such a manner as to help resist the forces of erosion and the periodic flooding that has devastated the area, most notably in the so-called Towyn Floods of 1990’. Tidal Electric noted that it was also ‘in advanced discussions’ with Conoco Global Power with a view to signing a Joint Development Agreement on this project.

As reported before, an even more ambitious set of proposals has been made by the Canadian company Blue Energy, including one for a 2.2GW tidal fence between islands in the Philippines. They have indicated interest in UK sites, but, perhaps surprisingly, only submitted general evidence to the Committee.

Obviously, it’s always wise to be cautious of ambitious sounding proposals and plans, some of which may just be exercises in trying to build up investor confidence, but then, as several witnesses said, that’s what is needed at present- with government support being an invaluable first base. That may still only be slight at present in the UK, but things really do seem to be moving at last.

* Not all the submissions were totally supportive. For example, although he seemed to support the LIMPET project, Prof Ian Fells played his traditional contrarian role, claiming that grid connection costs and integration problems could make wave, and presumably tidal current, hopeless as large scale power options.

More positively, there was a submission from SEAPOWER - the marine renewables association, a newly formed body, a pre-cursor to a Trade Association, representing the emerging UK marine renewable energy sector, which encompasses all wave and non-barrier tidal energy devices and technologies.

The full Select Committee report, including EERU’s evidence, is at: www.parliament.uk/commons/selcom/s&thome.htm

* The DTI consultation on the consents procedures for offshore wind projects also covers offshore ‘water driven’ plant, so some of the problems that developers have identified may be resolved.

NATTA Comment

The long battle for wave power

Over the years, NATTA has published several reports on the long battle to get wave energy accepted in the UK. One of the first was ‘Ruling Out the Waves’ in 1987. This was followed by compilations of reports from Renew, bringing the story up to date- Vol 1 in 1993 and Vol. 2 in 1998.

The story has been a tragic one of inspiring innovation and technical enthusiasm blocked by bureaucratic indifference, if not actual hostility. We are pleased that now things seem to be changing. Perhaps sensibly, apart from a few side swipes by Stephen Salter, the old ground was not raked over during the Select Committee hearings. The DTI did admitted that, with the benefit of hindsight, the decision to discontinue the Government’s wave energy R & D programme in 1994 ‘was clearly a mistake’.

So, perhaps that cleared the air. Hopefully, maybe now, we can put the past behind us and see whether wave power really can deliver what many hope it will - significant amount of clean green power. That said, even if wave power has at long last moved on from being a repressed option, there are likely to be other such episodes ahead, as other new technologies emerge. We have therefore published a special report by David Ross, reviewing the full story so far, in the belief that, if we do not learn from history, we are likely to repeat the same mistakes. See p 36 for details.