Memorandum 71
Supplementary evidence from the Department
for Business Enterprise & Regulatory Reform following the
evidence session on 23 January 2008
At the evidence session on 23 January the Committee
asked for a note on the number of applications that have so far
been received from companies to BERR's Marine Renewables Deployment
Fund (MRDF).
As discussed at the Committee, the purpose of
the MRDF is to take forward the demonstration of early stage pre-commercial
wave and tidal stream technologies that have completed their R&D,
but that are not yet commercially competitive within the market
created by the Renewables Obligation.
We therefore expect technology developers to
have operated their devices for a period sufficient to help ensure
that technologies are ready to be demonstrated and as MRDF projects
have reasonable potential for success. A key eligibility criterion
for the MRDF's Demonstration Scheme is to have operated at full
scale in a representative range of realistic sea conditions for
at least three months.
There have to date been two applications to
the MRDF's Demonstration Scheme. However, neither met the key
eligibility criterion of the scheme so the applications did not
proceed. The MRDF has three further components, Environmental
Research, Related Research and Infrastructure Support to which
funds have been committed.
BERR's Research Advisory Group is taking forward
generic research on the environmental impacts of wave and tidal
stream and £2 million from the MRDF has been allocated to
this activity.
In May 2007 BERR published two monitoring protocols
to enable the reporting of device performance in a consistent,
transparent, and meaningful way. These were produced by Edinburgh
and Heriot-Watt Universities and funded under the related research
part of the MRDF.
Finally, under the infrastructure component,
BERR has committed £4.5 million to the South West Regional
Development Agency's £28 million Wave Hub project that will
host a number of commercial scale wave energy projects (www.wavehub.co.uk)
and £1 million towards the new tidal-stream test facility
at the European Marine Energy Centre, Orkney.
Through the Energy White Paper the Renewables
Advisory Board (RAB) were asked to look at how progress towards
the commercialisation of these technologies might be accelerated
and specifically to consider the reasons for low take-up of MRDF.
The RAB report has now issued, and is expected
to be published early next month (and will be available on the
BERR website). It concluded that the MRDF Demonstration Scheme
is sound and recommended that the three month criterion should
continue fundamentally unchanged. The report makes several suggestions
to make the scheme more accessible, which ministers are now considering,
including that we interpret the three month criterion as flexibly
as possible.
7 March 2008
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