The Global Marine Renewable Energy Conference finished yesterday with a tour de force by Verdant Power. More of that later, but first my reactions to the main agenda. I've summarised the highpoint of each session here
Session 1: George Hagerman, Virginia Tech: Resource potential and technology status - excellent and knowledgeable overview of technology
Session 2: Keynote addresses. For me, the best was Matt Simmons. Matt is author of "
Twilight in the Desert" and founder of Simmons & Co. International, an oil-oriented investment banking firm. I first met Matt a few years ago, when I talked to him about a large UK offshore windfarm project. From memory, he was deeply sceptical then, but his thesis is now that oil production is soon to rapidly decline, and to avoid massive social dislocation and wars over limited resources, it's essential we now pursue alternative energy sources. It's a compelling thesis and convincingly presented. Matt's putting money where his mouth is, by supporting the new Ocean Energy Institute (to be built in Maine).
Sessions 3 and 4: Lots of worthy technical commentary and review of support mechanisms, from which nothing in particular lodged in the memory. Nice to see the UK well represented though.
Session 5: the main event - developers talking about financing their technologies. An interesting range of experiences and firms at different stages in the process. There was still some evidence of the wishlist - more complaining about the difficulties of getting across the "valley of death" than constructive suggestions on how to do it, though. Although, I suppose if you've got a great idea for closing the deal, you're going to want to keep it to yourself.
And that was day one. Unless you count the Canadian reception (and not a Labatt's in sight) and rumours of a bash at the Irish Embassy.
Day 2 opened with Congressman Jay Inslee, who put forward a very positive legislative agenda, which he promises he's working night and day to get through the House. These include a feed in tariff and a renewables obligation- which the conference participants rated the most important stimuli for the rollout of marine renewables.
Session 1 was a chance for EMEC and WaveHub to talk about their regulatory experiences, and for FERC and the MMS to talk about how consenting might work in the US.
Session 2 went through some of the environmental issues facing the Portuguese wave centre, and some other environmental matters. Bit of a chance for the academics to lobby for the "research feast" warned of by Neil Kermode of EMEC in the previous session.
Finally: closing remarks by Senator (R-AK) Lisa Murkowski. Unable to resist a certain partisan finger-pointing, but (unsurprisingly for a representative from Alaska), the Senator was pretty positive on marine renewables. Apparently, Alaska has more coastline than the rest of the US out together!
The final keynote was from NTSERDA's CEO, who's spending $2.5 million on R&D in the New York area (substantially on Verdent, I suspect), compared with a national total of $13 million from federal funds over the next two years.
In summary, as always with conferences the real value came from the talking to new people over the water cooler (or donut stand). I was very impressed that about 300 people made the trip to New York from all over the world, but also that many were from the US (where I hadn't thought so much was going on in marine renewables). The demographic split showed the largest groups were developers and academics - so the industry still needs to be attracting more investors, bankers and (probably) lawyers.
