UK hopes for marine energy could be dashed by nuclear revival

UK hopes for marine energy could be dashed by nuclear revival

Aberdeen (Platts)--25May2005


Renewed discussions about the deployment of a new generation of nuclear power
plants means that there is a very small window of opportunity for new
renewable technologies like wave and tidal power to take off, John Griffiths
of the UK Renewable Power Association said Wednesday. 

Speaking at an RPA conference on marine energy at that the All Energy
Exhibition in Aberdeen, Griffiths expressed an aspiration that the UK could
deploy 50-100MW of marine energy by 2010 and even 1GW by 2020. "But the
timeframe is now limited by the open debate on nuclear, which could push
marine energy out of the picture," said Griffiths. Other speakers highlighted
the many hurdles that must be overcome for marine energy to develop as a
commercially viable form of generation, competitive with wind power which
accounts for the lion's share of the UK's expanding renewable power portfolio.
Several UK companies are at the forefront of developing competing technologies
to harness energy from the sea, drawing on expertise from the offshore oil and
gas industry.

These include AWS Ocean Energy, a UK company that has the rights to
commercialize a wave energy generation technology using a submerged telescopic
device developed originally in the Netherlands with the support of Dutch
utility Nuon. AWS Ocean Energy Director Simon Grey told delegates that the
company had completed trials of a full scale pilot of its generator off
northern Portugal in 2004. Portugal offers an incentive tariff of Eur0.30/kWh
for marine energy, whereas in the UK marine energy has to compete with cheaper
and more established technologies like wind and biomass, which are given equal
treatment under the country's renewables obligation. 

When asked where AWS expected to deploy its first commercial machines Grey
said: "unless things change significantly in the UK, this is highly likely to
be in Portugal." Another UK marine energy developer, Ocean Power Delivery
announced last week it would deploy its first commercial 'wave farm' offshore
Portugal.

This story was originally published in Platts European Power Alert
http://www.europeanpoweralert.platts.com

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