A golden decade for tidal energy

Much of the stilted progress in the marine renewable space is predictably down to cash. Stephen Wyatt is the director of emerging technology at catapult. Catapult is a not-for profit network of innovation centres that help to link up businesses, bright ideas, and funding to get good high potential ideas as they put it into the marketplace. Chris Smith asked Stephen what the landscape for marine renewables looks like at the moment...

Stephen - The landscape for marine renewables is generally positive at the moment. There is a huge push towards net zero and offshore renewables generally have been identified as being a key part of the future energy mix.

Chris - Well you say it looks positive, but we've just heard from our previous guest that actually we are back in the 1990s in terms of the comparison between where other renewables are and marine renewables. So are you saying there's a lot of potential? It just is waiting to be realised?

Stephen - I think for things like tidal stream energy they are still in the development phase. We've spent the last 10 or 15 years moving from the lab scale prototypes through to full scale prototypes. And as we've just heard the first commercial arrays. We now really are in the place where we're looking to get genuinely commercial and moving to engage with the government's subsidy system that will allow us to move to that first phase of commercial projects.

Chris - Well, Simon Waldman was saying we basically learn by doing so have we got realistic technologies now that are actually enabling us to do that? And is there sufficient resource there to grease the wheels financially?

Stephen - We do have a handful of very credible technology concepts. Often these technologies are developed by small companies and the nature of the grant funding can be a little bit stop start. And of course they have to convince private sector investors with the right risk appetite to come in. So I'd say it's been a little bit of a turbulent journey, but we are now thankfully in the place where we have a number of credible concepts ready to scale up to these commercial arrays.

Chris - How much are the government putting up? Because obviously this is being led by governments. When you've got a big problem which needs somebody to de-risk it a bit, the way you de-risk it is governments give grants and that kind of thing. So how much potential funding is there?

Stephen - So historically tidal companies have received from government have received capital grants. And it's been a bit stop start as I say, but typically that's been between 10 and 20 million pounds per annum, but that's not a lot when you try...

Chris - Is that per project or is that for the entire field?

Stephen - No, that that's been in its entirety. It's not a lot when you sort of start looking across a number of concepts we're trying to progress here.

Chris - I mean, just putting that in perspective, just building one wind turbine costs 4 million. So, when you think you're now dealing with a very different environment where the exigences of being in the marine environment are huge, aren't they, 20 million is nothing.

Stephen - I think that's right. I think the tidal energy companies have worked incredibly hard to make a small amount of public funding go a long way. They've also had a bit of a hiatus in funding in recent years, but now thankfully due to a large part of lobbying by industry, we now have a subsidy regime in place that will allow them to tap into the same sort of project funding that we're seeing for things like offshore wind and nuclear. So if you like tidal stream, despite some of the headwinds of developing the technology has now come of age and they're able to bid into the same sort of subsidy pots as more established technologies,

Chris - We were hearing just now that, um, the prediction is that perhaps 10% of what we need in energy at the moment is potentially source-able from tidal stream and so on. Does that seem realistic to you? And do you think we are on target to get there and over what sort of time scale?

Stephen - Our sort of own analysis probably puts the figure a little bit higher than that? Definitely think it's realistic to assume that tidal stream will make a material contribution. It's there, it can be tapped into now, but ideally we want to continue to drive technology development, bring the cost of generation down a little bit more, and then we can start deploying commercial scale. My view is we're at the start of a golden decade here. And so over the next 10 years, we're gonna see tidal stream move at a rapid pace. Similar to the journey we've seen for things like offshore wind, where costs have more than halved over the last five years. And I think with the appropriate deployment levels, we'll see that happen again.