Rebooting marine energy. One year on.

A year ago I wrote a blog post entitled Rebooting Marine Renewables. Its centrepiece was an analysis of the electricity generated by wave and tidal-current plant in the UK as revealed by ROCs and REGOs. Now seems like a good time to update it by taking a fresh snapshot of the data to see what has happened since then. To keep this article short and sweet please read the original post for background and context. The most relevant part is where the graphs of the data are shown.

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…another thing

On rereading my previous post, ‘Rebooting marine renewables’, it occurred to me that it is mostly about why the technologies need to be ‘rebooted’, and not about how it should be done. It was already too long by the time I got to that bit and I just wanted to finish it off as quickly as possible. I think, therefore, that it would be worthwhile expanding on this point, as it’s actually the most important part of the whole thing. Read more

Rebooting marine renewables

Last Monday evening (8 February) I watched an online broadcast of a lecture entitled ‘Marine Renewables – Crossing the Valley of Death’, given at the Institution of Civil Engineers in London by Clare Lavelle, who is head of energy consulting in Scotland for Arup. Before that Clare worked for Pelamis Wave Power and before that for Scottish Power on its wave and tidal projects. Her presentation was very much a statement of the standard wave and tidal narrative that if only the government would spend enough money the technology would succeed. She even name-checked Professor Salter’s conspiracy theory and the one about how the UK lost its world lead in wind energy to the Danes. Read more