Breaking the waves

The new methodology involves the funding, co-ordinating and sharing incremental stages of research from disparate R&D activities, focusing on specific pieces of the wave energy jigsaw. Careful verification processes will be imposed before the next stage of research is identified and funded.

For the model to work, much will depend on leadership. In this and other respects Tim Hurst, who was appointed WES's first managing director earlier this summer inspires confidence.

Originally from Harrogate, the no-nonsense former RAF engineer officer exudes calm confidence that the WES approach will build on past lessons. An engineering graduate of Leeds and Manchester universities (with a master’s in renewable technology), he ran aircraft operations and maintenance, interspersed with project managing the development of new technology for military aircraft with contractors and research institutions. He also has rare experience of the marine energy sector, having worked as a consultant for the construction of the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Orkney.

Now that we know how difficult it is to devise a viable wave energy device why does he wish to persevere? And why have our hopes not been realised so far?

“It’s very easy to look back and say in hindsight that we were doing the technology at full scale too soon. People are saying that now, but it wasn’t immediately apparent at the time, because the scale of the technical challenge of putting a wave device in a high energy wave energy environment was not fully apparent.”

“We should have built at a small scale and built up to it. That’s obvious now, but it wasn’t obvious then. The challenge of what we were trying to do was not fully apparent.”

That rise-and-fall pattern, he suggests, was also caused by the nature of the funding landscape in the UK: “The kind of VC finance that supported those technology pilots… they want an exit, they want to see a product and want to see it sold on. They don’t want you to spend too long in a test tank, they want to see something credible out there bobbing around in the ocean delivering energy.”

“Also the public sector was saying we will give you money for full scale [prototypes] they were pushing the industry, and with the Renewable Obligation Certificates the more electricity you generated, the more money you made, so potentially the bigger the device you made, the more you make All of those factors were pushing technology companies to go large too quickly.”

Hurst also thinks that there was a certain amount of wishful thinking on the part of the early proponents of wave power: “There is an element of you don’t know what you don’t know. When you look at the engineering challenge, you see its about reciprocating motion and converting it into electrical generation, it shouldn’t be that difficult. We’ve seen similar things in other industries, it’s a technical problem we can solve.

“And it’s you get into to the sea do you realise that we want to make a device that is sensitive enough to capture the energy from a 1m wave, but that also has to survive a 24m wave. The amount of energy is 1000 times greater. There a 1000 times between the energy you want to capture normally and the energy and what you want to survive."

The thinking behind the establishment of WES was a response to the exodus of confidence, and investment by the private sector, which meant that public sector bodies like the Marine Renewables Commercialisation Fund, which were based on a match-funding model, had no more funding to match.

“When you get to the point where no-one is investing, then that kind of programme doesn’t work anymore. So you have to do something different.”

The result is a new model that provides “higher intervention rates” of up to 100% in order to keep funding the technology going while Scotland rides out of this trough.

“We increase confidence to the point at which the private sector comes back in. That is absolutely our objective, bringing back the confidence, but also in putting in more or higher percentage rates of funding as the development cost goes up, and trying to reduce duplication and increase collaboration.”

Haunted by the experience of early wind turbine technology, when Scotland is - according to myth at least - threw away its technological advantage due to loss of confidence, the enterprise agencies were determined not to give up so easily this time.

"We spent quite a lot of time looking at how you could fund technological development in the absence of private sector funding, so we got a new model, to provide higher intervention rates of up to 100% in order to keep funding going while we ride out of this trough. We increase confidence to the point at which the private sector comes back in."

Under the WES model, once something is produced that appears to work, it is tested and externally validated with publication of the results “Its something that can be built on, a building block for the next stage.”

So far WES has organised two “calls” for companies with technology ideas to come forward for a share of £7m rounds of funding. The first was for “power take off technology”, the key component that converts the device’s movement, from mechanical movement into electricity.

“The next round is 'novel devices', technology concepts we either haven’t seen before or haven’t tested fully before or fundamental reworks of existing technology. Applications closed on 13th August. We had a good response, including applications from Spain and Italy and Ireland, and we are now just looking at them, will be awarded towards the end of October.

Despite the setbacks, Hurst exudes confidence that Scotland is “absolutely ahead of the game”, and knows of no other country where wave technology is further advanced.

“We have the big advantage that we have been through this process and we have learned lessons, and we now have a new direction. I think there are a few countries around the world that have yet to learn that lesson and are still going through this cycle.”

“We welcome overseas companies coming here. This is a sector play. Scotland isn’t going to solve this problem by itself, but we have the best academics, a concentration of technology companies, political will, plenty of strong waves, a wealth of experience of deploying devices and platforms at sea. Some of the our rival countries have some of these, but none of them has got them all.”

ALL AT SEA

As King Canute found to his cost, promises to subject the waves to human agency carry a high risk of failure. The best to be said about the rise and fall of Scotland's wave energy dream is this: Now we know how not to do it.

In future, as Wave Energy Scotland’s new boss makes clear, political rhetoric and PR hype will follow advances in engineering science, not the other way round. This is not to say that Scottish waters will never become “the Saudi Arabia of marine energy” in Alex Salmond’s oft-quoted soundbite, but as Tim Hurst concedes, it will take much longer than political and business cheerleaders had led us to believe.

The fact is that the Scottish Government's efforts to combine boffin-power and hard cash to turn our waters into a giant battery have not yet produced anything close to a eureka moment, though when Salmond told a conference in 2011 that “In the next few years, the wave and tidal industry will move from demonstrator machines towards substantial commercial development”, he was suggesting otherwise. The government has consistently talked up wave power "potential" (a useful politician's word) implying it was as good as money in the bank because, as the White Paper on independence put it, "Scotland is rich in energy with around 25 per cent of Europe’s offshore wind and tidal energy potential, and 10 per cent of Europe’s wave potential".

With hindsight, it now looks like the deployment of tens of millions of pounds to create full scale prototype devices to exploit this potential bounty was eccentric or misguided - although the same could be said about successful industry pioneers throughout the ages.

It was certainly a tribute to the persuasive skills (some use less flattering terminology) of industry motormouths like now-defunct Pelamis’s Dr Richard Yemm or Aquamarine’s Martin McAdam, who coaxed millions out of investors by inspiring confidence in imminent success of their full-scale experimental devices. Aquamarine, whose Oyster concept was geared towards choppy near-shore waters and which, in much reduced form is now participating in the WES bid programme, received £93m since its foundation, of which about 30% was from public sources. McAdam had promised that his latest device the giant Oyster 800 would be commercially viable by 2014, a reckless prediction even at the high tide of excitement about the sector. It now looks as if building massive devices like the Oyster, unveiled by Alex Salmond in Methill in 2011, was as credible as the Wright Brothers unveiling a prototype passenger airliner before the Kitty Hawk trials, but because investors invest on a 3-5 year cycle, it had to be built anyway to show progress. In practice, no-one knew which component parts of this gremlin-plagued machine didn't actually work. Meanwhile the company spent £1m obtaining planning consent for an “array” of Oysters off the coast of Lewis before it was known whether a single unit could generate electricity for more than a few hours at a time.

For its part Pelamis’s deep-water “sea snake” Wave Energy Convertors attracted around £95m of which about a quarter was sourced from public grants. Although neither device delivered enough energy for a sustained period, both companies have since extolled the value of the data collected, and the lessons learned, also the focus they have brought to Scotland as a centre of excellence.

So was the Scottish Government wrong to talk up wave energy as much as it did? Some civil servants concede that it was, and cringe at the Saudi Arabia comment; “an albatross round our neck” one says.

But while over-hyping new technology can doom a sector to disappointment, conversely, it is part of any political leader's job to inspire confidence, and attract investors. The risk is that over-promising and under-delivering could undermine Scotland’s long-cherished credibility as a global centre of engineering.

One example of this was the Saltire Prize, the much-vaunted £10m award for a commercially viable marine energy device launched to great fanfare in 2008, and often cited many times to promote the impression that breakthrough was just round the corner. Over £100,000 has been spent on promoting this bounty, until the Herald revealed in February that it had quietly been shelved.

“The path to commercialisation is taking longer and proving more difficult than anyone initially expected" the prize’s website sheepishly explains: "The Saltire Prize Challenge Committee is now considering options for reshaping the prize to better reflect the circumstances of the wave and tidal sectors.”

Brian Wilson, the former Labour Minister who early advocated marine power research and who instigated the EMEC in Orkney when in government is one of the most trenchant of critics of Scottish Government energy policy. He believes that a lot of the razzamatazz surrounding marine energy was counter-productive as well as cynical. “An incremental approach would have been more likely to achieve progress by this time. The hype owned nothing to technology and everything to politics.”

The new practical approach adapted by WES and its strong leadership gives confidence that politics will take a back seat. The lesson learned from the breaking of the wave of hype surrounding Scottish marine energy is that verifiable actions speak louder than words.