The week isn’t even half over but it’s already been a busy one for the emerging marine energy industry. Marine energy – the term encompasses both wave and tidal power – is still in its infancy, apart from tidal barrage systems, of which there are a handful in operation around the world. Of those, France’s la Rance is the biggest, with a capacity of up to 240MW, although the UK looks likely to install an even bigger system at the Severn estuary.
Source: Trident Energy
But apart from barrages, it’s a curious industry and one still very much in development mode. That means a lot of things can go wrong: a wave energy machine installed off the UK’s north Suffolk coast fell over on Sunday, which must have been a dramatic sight. From the website of Trident Energy, which designed the machine:
Trident Energy can confirm that at approximately 12.35 on Sunday 20 September 2009 a problem during the deployment phase led to its demonstration wave generator overturning as it was being taken out to sea to begin its year-long offshore trial.
Another relatively well-publicised wave energy installation, created by Scottish company Pelamis Wave Power and deployed off the Portuguese coast a year ago, is a huge, snake-like series of articulated pipes. This project also ran into technical problems and is now offline – it’s not necessarily the end of the project, but the picture has been complicated by the collapse of the main investor in the project, Babcock & Brown.
So, there are plenty of opportunities to scoff in the fledgling marine industry. But the point is, it is fledgling – there are multiple different technologies still in development, particularly in wave power, and wind and solar have many years and vast amounts of investment on marine.
