The Technology Strategy Board announced a £2.5 million investment in wave and tidal projects today, awarding a share of this to a Pelamis Wave Power project. Other companies to benefit from this investment are Bauer Renewables Ltd and Marine Current Turbines Ltd.
The investment will be used to support testing of Pelamis machines at the Orcadian Pelamis P2 wave farm demonstration project, located at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) off the western edge of the Orkney mainland. The project, an array of two Pelamis P2 machines, will incorporate the E.ON owned P2 machine which was installed in 2010 and a P2 machine for Scottish Power Renewables which is currently under build at the PWP facilities in Leith, Edinburgh.
E.ON and ScottishPower Renewables announced the groundbreaking collaboration in the trialling of their respective Pelamis P2 devices in November 2010. The two companies are developing 100MW of Pelamis projects off the coast of Orkney and will use the information gathered from these trials to underpin larger commercial projects such as these.
The Technology Strategy Board is a business-led government body sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), acting to ensure that the UK remains a global leader in innovation. This investment in marine power projects will help to finance research and development focussing on supporting and underpinning the deployment of pre-commercial, full scale devices installed and operating in the sea.
Iain Gray, Chief Executive of the Technology Strategy Board, said:
“Investment in these projects will accelerate the pace of development of marine renewable energy in the UK. The projects will address a number of important technological challenges, including reducing the effect of the technologies on the environment and making the cost of wave and tidal stream energy production more competitive with other renewable energy sources. The UK is well placed to exploit wave and tidal stream energy resources and this kind of technology will be an important part of the renewable energy mix needed in the future”