EXCLUSIVE by Scottish Energy News
The Scottish Government – which has spent more than £25 million on trying to making surface-based wave energy machines float financially – is now looking at alternatives of generation power from the sea.
The Scot-Govt set up a special wave energy quango – which reports to another public sector economic development quango – after the Scottish wave energy sector collapsed three years ago with the financial sinking of Pelamis and Aquamarine.
Now it is offering an £80,000 contract for marine power experts to come up with ‘alternative generation technologies’ to the wave energy sector.
A spokesman for the Scottish Energy Minister said: “Offshore wind has achieved a great deal of cost reduction through incremental scale-up of turbines in their generation capacity.
“However it is believed that technical constraints or cost benefit balance will eventually limit turbine sizes.
“Wave energy may be able to make similar strides in competitiveness through scale-up of individual device size and/or generation capacities and may not be constrained until even greater scale is achieved than offshore wind.
“Therefore we’re looking for proposals for landscaping studies to identify and analyse opportunities for development of very large scale wave energy converters.
“The challenge is to identify and analyse opportunities for improved competitiveness through application of alternative generation technologies to the wave energy sector.
“The focus should be on the alternative generation technologies and their ability to convert the appropriate kinetic/potential energy of ocean waves into electrical energy, rather than their ability to conform with existing wave energy converter architectures.”
Technologies of interest could be those which: –
- Provide direct conversion of kinetic or potential energy to electrical energy, such as but not limited to electro active materials
- Reduce the number of energy conversion steps and
- Remove significant sub-system capital costs.
See also: http://tinyurl.com/yb7ujm86
Wave Energy Scotland is backing the wrong sea (power) horse
16 Nov 2017
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