EARLY NEXT MONTH a sea snake will be loaded on to a large container ship in the Western Isles of Scotland and will set out on its long way south to the coast of Portugal. Not just any sea snake. A mechanical sea snake, with the Latin name Pelamis, built in Scotland, tested in the North Sea and now about to join the long and depressing list of great British inventions that will be developed abroad. Pelamis generates electricity from wave power. It is a series of large articulated tubes, which move up and down with the swell of the sea, driving a turbine to produce power. For the past year it has been at work off the coast of Orkney, successfully feeding electricity into the grid through a sub-station near the town of Stromness.
Producing energy from the sea is the alchemy of the 21st century. The company that can come up with a reliable, cost-effective system of harnessing tide or wave power will have a head start on what may turn out to be the most effective and least obtrusive form of alternative energy yet conceived, creating a multimillion-pound industry. Last month the Carbon Trust, the government-funded independent company that looks at ways of reducing carbon emissions, issued a report stating that marine energy could provide a fifth of Britain’s energy needs. You might imagine, then, that the Government would be throwing its weight behind any development that offered the chance of filling the energy gap at this time of climate crisis.
Why am I not surprised, then, to learn that the opposite is the case? That Pelamis will be taken to the next stage of industrial development, not by the British, but by the Portuguese Government, which is intent on establishing itself as a world leader in marine energy? That this country, which has one of the longest coastlines in Europe, the most favourable tidal conditions and the best ideas for harnessing both wave and tide in Europe, has decided instead to take a more cautious look at wave energy and is leaving it to others to take the big risks?
The Department of Trade and Industry, which some years ago put in place a £50 million development fund for marine energy, has decided that the money will not be accessed until some time in 2007. It will release it slowly, over a seven-year period. It will look at three or four alternative systems. And then it will decide, in its own good time, to act. Or not as the case may be. In the meantime, it has announced a long-term consultation process to inquire into sources of alternative energy. Did you hear the sound of another iceberg breaking off the Arctic glacier and sliding into the sea?
Tide and time wait for no man. Pelamis is slithering from our grasp. The company that manufactures it, Ocean Power Delivery, one of the UK’s largest renewable manufacturers, based in Edinburgh, is shipping out the first of three machines, which will generate electricity and benefit from the higher tariffs that the Portuguese Government is offering. Because a new energy technology like this is expensive at the early stage of development, it needs government assistance in the form of favourable rates for the electricity it generates. Portugal is prepared to grant that. Britain is not. The green certificates offered by the Government for each unit of alternative energy are set at the same price, whether they are for wind, wave or tide, despite one of them — wind — already being years ahead in development terms, while its costs have fallen 80 per cent in 20 years.
Advertisement
You will presume, of course, that the DTI knows exactly what it is doing, that Pelamis has been found wanting, in terms of cost or efficiency, that there are other systems, also at the experimental stage, that offer a better prospect. And you may be right to do so. I would be more convinced if it were not for evidence of plain ignorance, as opposed to intransigence, from the same DTI.
Further north, in Shetland, George Leslie, a stalwart inventor of the old school, has successfully tested a “tidal energy converter”, a rotating cylinder with a complex system of expansion and compression coils, containing a mixture of air and water, capable of producing high levels of energy from the sea that will drive a turbine to produce electricity. With his eye on the powerful tides that flood around the northern Shetland Islands, he believes he has taken the first step towards a genuine method of harnessing the power they produce. He has won backing from the Shetland Islands Council and the local enterprise company, and is intent on building a larger model, which will produce up to ten megawatts of energy. He needs another £1 million and believes he will get it from private backers.
The DTI, which is running a multi-million-pound competition for new energy ideas, has dismissed the Leslie Pump. But the reasons it sets out in its letter of rejection show that it has failed to grasp the principle on which it was based. It states blandly that the brilliant system of expansion coils, the mechanism on which the whole device depends, was “not described, and is not understood”. Not surprisingly, Mr Leslie is incensed. “Some consultant with a degree has been given my papers and passed judgment on it without beginning to understand it. I bet he’s never held a hammer in his hand in all his life.”
I do not know for certain that the Leslie Pump will work. I cannot swear that Pelamis is the right system for producing cost-effective electricity from the waves. But I have more than a sneaking suspicion that Mr Leslie is right about the hammer — and that the timeservers, not the visionaries, have the upper hand at the DTI.