Daniel Englander

British Ocean Scheme Takes A Dive February 18, 2008 at 7:54 AM

British mariners have suffered few defeats in their long and storied history. And never (well, almost never) at the hands of their own government. However, the formation and recent failure of the $100 million Marine Renewables Deployment Fund is a thrashing on the level of the crushing blow dealt to the English Counter Armada in 1589 at the hands of the Spanish fleet. It is also reminiscent of the submarining of Salter’s Duck by the British Atomic Energy Authority in 1987.

Britain’s Department for Business Enterprise & Regulatory Reform established the Marine Renewables Deployment Fund in 2005 to promote wave and tidal power technology development. $84 million of the $100 million fund was set up specifically for pre-commercial, multi-device R&D. In a country with nearly 30 ocean power research programs and technology companies and a practical resource equivalent to 20 percent of its generation capacity, you’d think the money would have gone faster than Roger Bannister at the Iffley Road track. Think again.

As of last week, only two companies have applied for funding from the three year old program, and both were rejected. A closer inspection of the funding mandate reveals the flaw behind the MRDF. According to a recent report (pdf) from EEF, a UK business advisory, companies eligible for MRDF grants “must have demonstrated full-scale versions of their devices in a range of sea conditions for three months continuously or six months in any 12-month period.” To anyone who follows the ocean power industry as closely as I, these criteria seem at best laughable, and wholly shortsighted.

In 2005 and 2006, only a handful of UK ocean companies had managed to produce a full-scale technology prototype. At the time Marine Current Turbines, a leading tidal company, was planning the installation of its prototype 300 kW Seaflow turbine in Lynmouth, while it’s 1.2 MW SeaGen was merely a glint in technical director Peter Fraenkel’s eye. Only a year prior, Phil Metcalf wiped the champagne and tears from his eyes as he christened Pelamis Wave Power’s test launch at the European Marine Energy Center in Orkney - the commercial scale Pelamis wouldn’t hit the water until March 2007. These companies, along with Voith Siemen’s Wavegen project, were the most advanced companies following the launch of MRDF.

Sea tests for survivability (as Finavera found out this fall), site selection, and installation and maintenance are the most important factors and most significant costs for ocean power technology development. The technologies themselves are based on developments in wind turbine, offshore oil rig, and hydroelectric engineering and, as such, are fairly well understood. However, testing technologies at scale and in the water remains a major industry hurdle, and few companies are able to broach that obstacle. Primary funding should focus on helping these companies get out of the wave tank and into the ocean. Commercial development has already proven its value to power companies and the capital markets.

BERR demonstrated a fundamental knowledge lack by setting the bar so high while ocean power companies grasped liked so many second graders at the monkey bars, unable to reach the MRDF’s lofty standards. If and when the DOE decides to jump into the ocean power game, they might learn a valuable lesson from BERR’s mistake.

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