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Renewable Funding Being Held Back By Commercialisation Pressures

 

Pressure relief valves are essential to any energy project, and so is funding for the project.

Despite this, a new report from Imperial College London and Strathclyde University in Glasgow has argued that some forms of renewable energy in the UK have failed to achieve the growth expected of them due to unrealistic expectations of commercialisation being placed on them too soon.

The need for state-supported developers to secure private-sector match funding had caused stagnation in wave and tidal energy, despite the UK, and particularly Scotland, having the capacity to produce much more of this form of renewable energy.

The report Examining the effectiveness of support for UK wave energy innovation since 2000 lays out a ten point plan to boost the sector in the UK. One of these is to remove the pressures to commercialise a project so early on in its inception.

It also calls for a longer term strategy in Scotland to boost the sector and capitalise on the strong renewable resources available to the country, which could allow it to become a global leader in wave energy.

“The report points towards two weaknesses in wave innovation that can be remedied: first the lack of convergence on a dominant design that has been the key to success for other renewable technologies.

“Second, fragmentation of support across many overlapping schemes,” said Professor of sustainable energy at Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy Jim Skea.

Scottish islands in particular have been using wave energy for the past decade, providing off-grid resources where they are needed the most.