Renew On Line (UK) 39

Extracts from the Sept-Oct 2002 edition of Renew
These extracts only represent about 25% of it

18. Forum - from Renews139’s Forum section

Public Wave Power

David Ross submitted a resolution to SERA for their AGM in June, calling on the ‘Labour Party, and its government, to implement the wave energy programme introduced by Tony Benn when he was energy secretary in 1976 to build 2,000 megawatt power stations in the deep sea, the size of giant oil tanks, to generate electricity. These to be owned and operated by the State in competition with the privatised sector of the electricity industry, in fulfillment of Labour’s long-standing commitment to a mixed economy.’ The resolution was passed.

Instant 2GW plants are perhaps something of a throwback to the ‘giantism’ of CEGB prehistory, but the idea is still interesting, even if in practice it would probably mean using smaller individual plants, on the way to going further out to sea, when we really could be talking of gigawatts. What’s even more interesting is that this motion attempts to reopen the debate on electricity privatisation, as well as wave energy, and put on the political map the idea that we could have a nationalised power station generating renewable energy. That is not so far-fetched as it might seem at first glance- the newly proposed wave test site on the Orkneys could usefully be a public sector research centre, performing something like the role the Riso Labs did for windpower so successfully in Denmark in the early years. It provided test and certification facilities for privately developed windturbines. The wave centre could however do more, it could also generate power, to earn its keep. Why not? If the dreaded ‘N’ word is a problem, some parts of this operation could be run as public-private partnership, as the government seems to want to do for Sellafield. But what’s wrong with a publicly run wave programme- along side a commercial one, if the private sector is so inclined, to see which works best? We’d be interested in your reactions to this idea.