Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 79)
WEDNESDAY 14 MARCH 2001
PROFESSOR STEPHEN
H SALTER FRSE AND
MR THOMAS
THORPE
60. Have you any view then about the particular,
if you like, mechanistic, engineering solutions, whether under-sea
turbines, tidal fences, the various types of coastal-located wave
devices; which model do you think is likely to be ready for market
first?
(Professor Salter) I think I am personally too close
to give you a detached opinion on that.
61. Perhaps Mr Thorpe will give us an overview?
(Professor Salter) I can tell you what the characteristics
of a good device are, and I have tried to make mine fit that;
but I think that I have always been trying to make the maximum
use of the resource, at the cost of making things more advanced
than they would need to be to begin with. So, if you like, I am
still going on, trying to make Boeing 707s, knowing that other
people will want to go through the biplane and piston engine stage.
Chairman
62. When you say the maximum use of the resource,
it does not mean necessarily maximum use of the power available,
because there is so much of that, you can be profligate with that;
you are trying to make maximum use of the cash resource turned
into steel and turned into—
(Professor Salter) No, I mean making maximum use of
what is in the water now.
63. But why, because there is so much of it,
it does not matter whether you are only 25 per cent efficient
on that?
(Professor Salter) You say that now, but you will
not say that when you have got to the end of your first resource.
If you really want to run Europe on it, you have got to use it
effectively; you do not need to do it yet, but it is like thinking
that there is an infinite amount, and finding that there is not.
I think that we should plan seriously for building wave power
installations from Iceland right down to the Cape Wrath, and then
right round to Cape St. Vincent, with the breaks for the ships
to get through; and if you do that you can think about running
three European countries. So it is not that big, it is not big
enough for the whole of Europe.
64. Forgive me, but if I were involved in this
I would say to myself, since we are getting virtually nothing
out of the sea at the present time, I would rather succeed and
be inefficient in my success than go for maximum efficiency and
be delayed or fail?
(Professor Salter) That is an important first step,
just as, first of all, you want to start off with the hot-air
balloon; but, in the end, you are going to want to use all of
it and make it as good as you possibly can.
65. We probably do not disagree so strongly?
(Professor Salter) No.
66. But it is a matter of time between us?
(Professor Salter) Yes. For instance, I am trying
to place my devices as closely packed as possible, so that I am
not worried about them bumping into each other. Now I know that
it can be actually more efficient, hydronomically to have a solo
device that can get energy in from the sides; but if you want
to make the best use of every millimetre of sea-front you must,
eventually, go for close-packed devices.
67. Mr Thorpe, Dr Turner did invite you to make
an overview comment; since Professor Salter said he was probably
a little favoured in one form rather than another, you might have
a more impartial view?
(Mr Thorpe) I think I have worked with 90 per cent
of the wave energy devices being developed throughout the world.
At this moment, it is impossible to say which are going to be
the winners, because they are putting their first devices into
the water and they are actually carrying out their research and
development on the first demonstration devices, which is a horrendous
thing to do, but they have to do that because of cash flow problems.
I can say that not just myself but big engineering companies with
which I have worked have looked at these devices, and say: "Yes,
these are realistic devices, they are technically viable; the
only question is, can we make them commercially viable?"
There has been a historic reduction in the predicted costs of
generating wave energy, of a similar magnitude to that in wind
energy, onshore wind; onshore wind has made this reduction in
costs through government-supported research and development, but
also through massive support in actually putting plant out there.
I have done a `back of the envelope' calculation and I think that
that support, from various governments, is of the region of £10
billion. Wave energy has managed to make that kind of reduction
without that level of support.
Dr Turner
68. So that implies that potential reduction
with full exploitation would be much greater?
(Professor Salter) Indeed, it would.
Dr Iddon
69. I am going to look at the commercial viability
for a moment, and will just repeat the statement that was given
in the earlier session, from a Government memorandum, where the
Government stated, and I quote: "None of the wave or tidal
stream concepts has yet been demonstrated to be commercially viable".
Now I think you have already suggested your answer to that, but
I will put the question to you; would you agree with that statement,
Mr Thorpe?
(Mr Thorpe) Commercially viable: I am not quite sure
exactly what that would mean. No renewable energy technology starts
off being commercially viable; they have got to go up a learning
curve, learn how to do things better and cheaper. Wind energy,
when it was first supported by the Government, received a price
of, I think it was, 11 pence per kilowatt hour. The first demonstration
scheme on wave, which started operating last year, received a
price of 5.9 pence per kilowatt hour; so it is starting off at
almost twice as good as wind started off. It will require some
time and some level of support to create an initial market, so
that it brings investment into the technologies, both wave and
tidal, and generates enough of a market so that these devices
can start to pick up economies of scale, because that is where
the big price reduction is going to be. After that, yes, I do
believe they will be commercially viable.
70. So, apart from the toilets at the Randolph
Hotel, what other major barriers are there to getting the commercial
exploitation going?
(Mr Thorpe) Reference has been made by the earlier
presentations about problems with connection to the grid, and
very small companies having to bear very large costs for this,
costs which are independently calculated to be much smaller than
what the utilities are asking. There is the problem of creating
an initial market. The idea of having a wave and tidal centre
of excellence, or test centre, I think, would be a useful one,
because that would finally manage to do what I have singularly
failed to do over ten years, and that is to get all the experts
to pool their knowledge, to co-operate, experts not just from
academia but also from industry. But the main thing I see is providing
the initial market.
71. And the next question is, we are under the
impression that the best places to generate wave and tidal energy
are the least accessible places to main centres of population,
and you heard in the previous session that we discussed transmission
costs. Do you think that is a major difficulty, or is it one that
can be overcome; and, finally, do you think that, if it is something
that cannot be overcome, this wave and tidal energy is something
for niche markets, like small islands?
(Mr Thorpe) Within the UK then, quite definitely,
the best areas for generating energy from waves would be off the
west coast of Scotland and the southern and western coasts of
England; they are not particularly close to major centres of population.
Therefore, whenever I have carried out an analysis of this situation,
I have included the costs of connection to the nearest part of
the high voltage transmission grid, and those costs are 20 per
cent of the overall cost of a scheme; that is in the UK. Earlier
this year, I had the enjoyment of visiting Australia and working
on a wave energy device there, which was 100 kilometres south
of Sydney, not particularly inaccessible. When I have looked throughout
the world to do a commercial evaluation of the prospects for wave
energy, that is, how much wave energy could we get at a commercial
basis in the next ten to 20 years, I estimate that the maximum
market is something like £500 billion; and with the current
generation of wave energy devices, if they fulfil their potential,
then the market will be about £200 billion, and that means
that it must be accessible in a lot of places.
(Professor Salter) The Republic of Ireland has a very
good wave climate and it has deep water closer in to shore, and
it could be the case that it would be best to put wave plant in
there, let the Irish have all the electricity they want, while
we come across, and then come across the Irish Sea. So that is
another possibility. But it is really rather depressing, when
you look at the map of the Scottish grid, how inconveniently it
has been arranged; it is as if it had been designed by somebody
who did not like wave power.
Mr McWalter
72. I was interested in your memorandum, where
you said there always seems to be a layer, or, indeed, layers,
of senior people with negative views about renewables and the
power to make them stick; this power seems to be inversely related
to the technical knowledge of the subjects. Such flattering remarks
suggest perhaps that your view of the Government's position would
not be very positive. But might it not be the case that even people
who really want to see the renewable systems really expand, they
might form the view that this is not the best horse to back? And
I note that government funding on research, say, for photovoltaic
cells is quite a lot higher than it is for wave power. So getting
past your general view, really, do you think that there is an
overall government strategy which actually gives wave and tidal
energy the wrong prioritisation within an overall system which
is quite expanding, in terms of its venture research?
(Professor Salter) That is what those sort of people
were saying about wind energy in the early seventies, because
they dismissed that as well, even people who later on made their
careers in wind energy. So I think we are going to need all of
the renewables, and I really would like to contribute to as many
of them as I can. At the moment it is looking quite interesting
to use some of the power conversion mechanisms that we developed
for wave for the power take-off of offshore wind turbines. We
can save a great deal of weight and we can make them much more
controllable. I do not want to bang the drum for any single renewable,
I want them all to succeed, and I think that we will need them
all; the world needs them all, even if perhaps Britain does not,
but the world needs them all.
73. So all of them?
(Professor Salter) Yes.
74. An open cheque, as it were, in terms of
research funding?
(Professor Salter) What you need to spend to do the
research is tiny compared with what you are spending on non-renewable
energy. A few PhD studentships can have a tremendous impact.
Chairman
75. Did you mean conventional energy then, because
you were talking about renewable energy, you say it is tiny compared
with what we are spending on renewable energy? I do not think
that made sense?
(Professor Salter) A tiny proportion of what we are
spending on all kinds of energy would give you a very good research
programme; even what they are spending on the public relations
for it would be enough. So, I think, to get it going, we must
believe that the politicians want it to succeed; that is the feeling
you get from going to Denmark, you feel that everybody wants it
to happen, you do not feel that there is anybody pulling in the
wrong direction.
Mr McWalter
76. You might feel that about wind power but
not about wave power?
(Professor Salter) No, about wave power, too.
77. You feel that is the place to go?
(Professor Salter) Yes. I mentioned in my evidence
about the funding for a prototype; any new inventor of a wave
power device in Denmark can get 50,000 kroner.
78. But they do not have any industrial size
prototypes, do they?
(Professor Salter) They did not have an aerospace
industry when they started doing wind, but they have got one now,
they have got a very vigorous wind industry. So they want wave
energy to happen, they are desperate to make it happen, and I
think they will succeed.
79. So, okay, currently, this whole process
of leading through from R&D to commercial exploitation, if
you do not feel the Government's relation to that is appropriate
for wind and tidal power, and, I must say, I am inclined to agree
with you perhaps, how are we going to address that, what factors
do we need to address, in order to try to—
(Professor Salter) You need to have a transparent
method of assessing the designs, which is the great thing that
Tom Thorpe has contributed; before that, it was an opaque thing,
we put in drawings and somebody came back with numbers and we
could not challenge them. That is the first step. I think the
second step is, you must do very good model testing and computer
modelling, the computers are getting very good at predicting the
way things behave in waves, they are much better than they were
just a few years ago. So I would like to see rigorous model tests
and computer tests and spread sheets for cost prediction. We need
also to get a more precise way of working out what things cost.
Much of that information is actually a commercial secret. In many
cases, somebody will be fired if they tell you what it costs per
tonne or per metre of weld. We need to find ways of getting that
information, in order to optimise the designs. Then you can then
make really very good decisions. If this data is done well enough
and presented well enough and clearly enough, in a uniform way,
I think you can then make much more rapid progress than by building
bigger devices and testing them at sea, with the risk that you
may have overlooked something.
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