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Scotland seeks power in ocean waves and tides

Scotland's Orkney Islands, swept by gales and buffeted by Europe's fiercest tides and waves where the Atlantic meets the North Sea, now shelter a state-of-the-art test center for harnessing the power of the ocean.

The opening of the European Marine Energy Centre last week in Stromness in the Orkney archipelago off northern Scotland puts the islands on the map in the study of tapping renewable energy from the movement of waves and tides.

EMEC, a US$10.4 million investment, has so far generated but one customer, an Edinburgh-based company called Ocean Power Delivery. But it hopes for many more, especially from outside Britain.

Kinetic energy -- or movement -- from the motion of waves can be used to power turbines. Waves rising into a chamber force out air which spins a turbine turning a generator.

Other systems use the up-and-down motion of a wave to power a piston that moves up and down inside a cylinder, in turn moving a generator.

Ocean Power Delivery has developed a prototype called Pelamis, consisting of four vast floating tubes, each about 120-meters long, designed to convert Atlantic wave energy into electric power via a system of hydraulic pistons. The production target is 750 kilowatts an hour, and EMEC's job is to test it out.

EMEC's Stromness base, capable of handling up to seven megawatts an hour, hopes soon to attract numerous foreign customers moving into the area of marine energy and keen to test out prototypes in extreme conditions.

And Orkney has extreme conditions. Tides there regularly flow at three to six meters a second and pounding waves sometimes leap as high as 10 meters.

Orkney, together with the Shetland Isles further north and the western Scottish coast, offer an unrivalled source of renewable energy in Europe, estimated at 21.5 gigawatts, or enough to provide for nearly all of Scotland's five million people.

However only a fraction -- 1.3 gigawatts or less than 10 percent of all electrical energy produced in Scotland -- is likely to be harnessed by the year 2020, according to the Forum for Renewable Energy in Scotland (FREDS).

But the Scottish capital Edinburgh has meanwhile set a target of meeting 40 percent of its electricity needs by means of renewable energy by the year 2020 -- twice as ambitious as the 20 percent set for Britain as a whole.

However Scottish efforts have not gone unnoticed in London. This month Patricia Hewitt, secretary for trade and industry, announced that 50 million UK pounds would be earmarked for a marine energy development fund.

EMEC in Orkney hopes to draw on this source to cope with competition from Portugal.

Portuguese authorities are also hoping to attract researchers and enterprises, and are offering highly favorable prices of US$0.28 per kilowatt per hour for all electricity generated from Atlantic waves.

"Without government aid, there is an increased risk that the fragile British marine energy sector could be attracted by Portugal and probably to Portugal," FREDS said in its 2004 report, which preceded Hewitt's announcement.

To attract public investment, the Edinburgh city authorities have also pointed to the employment factor, noting that every megawatt generated by wave and tide could also generate seven to 10 new jobs.

That would be 7,000 jobs by 2020. And by that date, says the British government, Britain could be importing as much as three-quarters of its energy needs if something is not done about developing renewable energy.
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