Examination of Witnesses (Questions 200
- 201)
WEDNESDAY 30 JANUARY 2008
DR PAUL
GOLBY, DR
DAVID CLARKE,
PROFESSOR PETER
BRUCE FRSE AND
DR ALISON
WALL
Q200 Mr Cawsey: You have both commented
on how long this has been an issue in research work. Is there
no way that some sort of model of best practice can be brought
forward and used by the partners so that there is some way of
fast tracking this a bit when you come on to new partnerships?
Is that pie in the sky?
Professor Bruce: Universities
have a fairly uniform approach to this, but they are one sector
and often of course you are dealing with many different industrial
sectors and they have different approaches and different companies
and different philosophies. We have agreements with companies
in Japan, the States, the UK and elsewhere in Europe and their
cultures are often different and their attitudes towards intellectual
property are often very different and that is the problem.
Q201 Chairman: I would like to follow
up on this. There was a comment you made earlier, Dr Golby, really
about how small the actual amount of money which we are putting
into, if you like, applied research field here, particularly government
money and you made the point about commercial money from a company
like E.ON. Actually testing new renewable devices is a hugely
costly activity. Why have we not followed the example of Germany
and the United States of actually having central testing facilities
where people can come along, small businesses in particular, with
their new technologies and literally have them tested at national
test centres? David, would it be a better use of your time and
resources to actually be able to provide that to, if you like,
the applied research community? This question is really to you,
Paul and David.
Dr Golby: I think that it is a
good question. We are where we are unfortunately, I think. At
the time of privatisation, the CEGB, for example, had such facilities
and of course those were split and fragmented in that period and
we now have to build from the base upwards. I agree with you conceptually
that having national facilities in these areas would be better
than where we are today, but unfortunately that is not where we
start today.
Dr Clarke: From my point of view,
we do have a number of substantial test facilities in the UK,
whether it is the NAREC Centre or the Wavehub for marine, but
also in the wind area there are facilities which can be used to
test specific aspects of the system, but I do agree that one of
the roles of ETI may well be to actually categorise creation of
I will not call it national test facility but a dedicated test
area for new technologies bearing in mind that quite often, at
the scales we are talking about, the best platform to use may
well be a real machine in a real environment, so it may be a current
operating wind turbine in the Thames Estuary, for the sake of
argument. We may see that there are a few machines there which
we could use as a test platform for instance, but we will progress
that.
Chairman: I am sorry that we have overrun
in this session. Dr Paul Golby, Dr David Clarke, Professor Peter
Bruce and Dr Alison Wall, thank you very, very much indeed for
your time this morning.
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