Blog: reNews report on Orkney’s marine energy boom

EMEC hosted a visit last month from Seb Kennedy, deputy editor of leading renewables newsletter reNews, to report on the current boom of wave and tidal testing activity in Orkney.

Seb reflects on his visit below:

“The most impressive known display of cutting-edge marine renewables engineering anywhere in the world”

I first visited Orkney in July 2009 to see the first generation of prototype wave and tidal devices being tested at EMEC. Aquamarine Power was installing Oyster 1 at Billia Croo, OpenHydro was busy at its twin-pile platform and TGL was preparing to join them at the Fall of Warness test site with its 500kW tidal turbine.

The article I wrote upon my return was headlined “EMEC hits its stride”. Having three device developers on-site in one summer was unprecedented, and the article reflected on this achievement following several admittedly fallow years for EMEC and the broader marine renewables industry.

Fast-forward four years and EMEC’s 2009 “stride” looks in retrospect more like baby steps.

The test centre is approaching operational capacity with ten wave and tidal systems installed or imminent. There is so much to report that this month’s EMEC feature article has been split into two, with further coverage planned in the 12 September edition of reNews.

The scale of activity and breadth of technologies at EMEC is by a sizeable margin the most impressive known display of cutting-edge marine renewables engineering anywhere in the world. Even more importantly, encouraging performance data is now being released from the leading contenders and hundreds of megawatt-hours of electricity have been generated onto the Orkney grid.

But technological progress must be put in perspective. Today’s successes have taken considerably longer and cost much more to achieve than anticipated. Commercialisation remains a long way off and the emergence of a market for marine converters is not a foregone conclusion.

More immediately, Orkney’s grid constraints are having a stark impact on development plans and some companies are being forced to develop initial multi-turbine arrays elsewhere in the UK or further afield. Moreover, none of the UK’s planned array projects have yet reached financial close.

To my mind, regular updates on technology progress including transparent performance results from sea trials will be a central driver to overcoming these various obstacles. The political, institutional and corporate will to tackle complex infrastructure and market constraints cannot materialise without the information needed to assume a degree of confidence in the future cost-effectiveness and reliability of ocean technologies. Everything hangs on the belief that the devices will eventually work as promised and consistently over 20-plus operational years.

The surge in activity at EMEC will inevitably lead to a further wave of setbacks and successes. I look forward to breaking the wave and tidal news from Orkney and the wider industry as it happens, in reNews and online at http://renews.biz/.