Why Wave?
Resource
The global wave resource is the largest of the ocean energies and is vast.
To recognise the scale of this it is comparable to the existing deployed markets for nucleur and hydroelectric power.
The EU WaveNet estimated a global economically extractable resource for wave energy of between €50 billion and €280 billion. The largest portion of this market will be for floating, deep water wave energy converters such as OWEL. There is presently no dominant company in this area, and our research suggests that the OWEL design has the potential to become the most attractive technology.
The Carbon Trust report, “Future Marine Energy” concluded that there is considerable potential for the marine renewable markets to grow, and Renewable UK state that it is possible to reach an installed capacity of 2GW of marine energy by 2020; at least half of this is likely to come from Wave Power.
The UK has signed up to the EU Renewable Energy Directive, which includes a UK target of 15 percent of energy from renewables by 2020. Although much of this will be from wind power, wave and tidal will also play an important role.
The Carbon Trust1 has estimated a practically exploitable wave resource of around 50 TWh/y of electricity in the UK, equating to a total installed capacity of about 21GW (based on a 27% load factor). This is about as much potentially exploitable resource in the UK as onshore wind.
Economics
Further work by the Carbon Trust assesses the global potential of wave energy alone to be 2,000-4,000TWh/year, requiring a £500bn industry to deliver the full potential.
The European Ocean Energy Association expand this global figure (using current state of the art wave energy technology) to be in the order of 45,000 TWh/year, with a corresponding increase in the size of the industry.
Incentives
Governments across the world have introduced targets and incentives to support new renewable energy technologies. For example in the UK electricity producers are obliged to generate 30% of their output from renewable sources by 2020.
Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs) are issued for renewable electricity produced, and these can be sold to producers who don’t meet their targets .Wave energy in England and Wales currently receives 3 ROCs as an added incentive to generators (this level is currently 5 ROCs in Scotland).
The cost of conventional fossil fuels is also rising to meet the falling cost of marine renewables, and this will make wave energy an even more attractive proposition as the years go by. This convergence of prices will also mean less reliance on government incentives as time passes.
Conclusion
Wave energy is a gigantic resource, and nascent markets round the world are being stimulated by national governments. The potential size of the worldwide industry is huge, and OWEL is ideally placed to take advantage of this opportunity.
1 Carbon Trust (2006): ‘Future Marine Energy Results of the Marine Energy Challenge: Cost competitiveness and growth of wave and tidal stream energy’