OREC urges funding boost for marine energy

Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult has called for urgent action to be taken to support the UK’s wave and tidal industries and encourage investment. OREC is a body encouraging innovation and rapid commercialization in offshore wind, wave and tidal technologies.

The OREC report has highlighted the potential UK market to be £76 billion by 2050. It warned that uncertainty of funding in the first outlay is causing investors to be unwilling to invest or have removed funding during the early stages of investment.

They have called for further investment from both the public and private sectors to ensure the first tidal arrays are brought to a financial close. This will push the wave industry along to commercial readiness. They estimate the tidal industry needs to benefit from at least £100 million and the wave industry from £200 million if it is to meet its potential.

Furthermore, the ORE Catapult has identified five areas which would assist with commercialization of technology. These areas are:

1. Alignment of the ways in which we assess technologies.

2. Standardization of the approach to developing technologies.

3. Further coordination between public and private sector investment.

4. Coordination of due diligence for both projects and technologies.

5. Introduction of a Government role in underwriting debt finance.

ORE Catapult’s Strategy & Commercialisation Director Dr Stephen Wyatt said: “Wave and tidal technologies represent a vital part of our future renewable energy mix in terms of the social and economic benefits they bring, but sector funding has reached a critical juncture and it is vital we act now in order to bolster this strategically important market for the UK economy.” “The Catapult is already working with industry and others, particularly academia, to focus research priorities around wider critical path components which have less to do with a developer’s intellectual property, and more to do with issues around reliability, health and safety, installation methodology, and electrical connections, to de-risk and drive down industry costs.” “Within the marine sector, we are involved in a number of joint industry projects, such as the Marine Farm Accelerator (MFA) programme, which we lead in collaboration with The Carbon Trust. With commercial-scale marine energy farms close to deployment in UK waters, the MFA project is working to develop technologies that are essential for these energy arrays and accelerating their development to de-risk technology and enable future cost savings.”