Ten wave and tidal power schemes get go ahead

Link to the article: Channel 4 News By Julian Rush

The dream of harnessing the power of the waves and the tides to generate electricity has passed a significant milestone, writes science correspondent Julian Rush.

Ten projects have been granted leases to install the world's first commercial-scale wave and tidal power schemes in the waters off northern Scotland.

Between them, the proposed six wave and four tidal projects in the Pentland Firth and Orkney could produce 1.2GW of electricity by 2020, enough for some three quarters of a million homes - and about the same as a new nuclear reactor.

That is nearly double the originally scheduled 700MW, which the industry body RenewableUK says "clearly demonstrates that the industry has now reached a stage where it is ready to deliver". RenewableUK is calling on the government to commit to a minimum of £220m to support wave and tidal development over the next five years.

Some of the strongest tidal currents in the world race around UK shores and there's some of the highest energy in the waves that roll in from the Atlantic. And while wave power is, to an extent, dependent on the weather, tidal power has the tremendous advantage of being totally predictable.

In spite of the fact that the UK's waters have been called the "Saudi Arabia of marine power", it is a resource that has a long and inglorious history of being ignored by successive governments until very recently.

The scandal of how, in the 1970s and 80s, Whitehall officials secretly killed off wave power by understating by a factor of 10 the power output of Professor Stephen Salter's "nodding duck" wave machine - some believe deliberately because they favoured nuclear power - cast a long shadow over the technology.