Notes of 'Post-it' exercise at Tidal Site Opening
Three posting areas were set up and announced at the Orkney Islands Council reception on the Thursday evening before the Tidal Site Opening. These were aimed at eliciting the views of the participants so as to help drive the industry forward.
Guests were asked to jot down ideas that would help deliver a sustainable energy system & post them for discussion.
The following are the unedited contents of each of the three category areas that sought to identify:
- What someone needs to change to get to a fully sustainable energy supply system.
- What EMEC needs to do to help get to this point
- What individuals need to do
Someone
- Exploit local embedded renewables - wind, microhydro
- Change OFGEM's remit to include environmental issues and carbon
- Reduce food miles
- Government: £500M (Context Olympics £12,000M+, Channel Tunnel ?)
- Cooperation & collaboration between developers . Areas such as vessel hire, cable maintenance, environmental studies
- Live closer to where you work
- Efficiency, Efficiency, Efficiency in use of any (kind) source of energy
- Improve grid capacity in west coast & islands and encourage development of energy storage technologies to mitigate intermittency
- Stricter regulations concerning house construction, energy efficiency
- Encourage engineering students in general and electrical engineers in particular
- Bury the cable (smd.co.uk)
- Serious shortage of some skills in the UK (e.g. electrical engineering) government/universities to do more to get more engineers coming through
EMEC
- Share experience proactively
- Create an EMEC users group for collaboration
- Keep the work local
- More cables
- Provide vessel to support installation
- Power to the inevitable nuclear waste repository with mixture of wind, wave and tides
- PR campaign especially for young people (next generation) to set their minds and make them enthusiastic about ocean energy
- Hydrodynamic test facility in Orkney coupled to EMEC? Continue to devbelop EMEC and Orkney as centre of excellence for marine renewables
- Wave power - Western Isles, Tidal - Pentland/Orkney - Scottish Dimension
- A major cost for every trial tidal device is the fixing to the seabed. Can EMEC provide as infrastructure a system of device location which companies could use?
- Grid Access in next 5 years
Individual
- Capture the history of the building of an industry
- 'If it was easy there would be no point in doing it.'
Conclusions
Although there must have been a significant self selection of EMEC supporters at the event the comments appear to be universally positive.
The views in this exercise are those of the attendees, and not necessarily EMEC staff or Board.
Several of the items within the lists are those within the recent strategy intent paper presented to funders. EMEC's direction therefore appears to be the same as that being suggested by the participants to this exercise.