Sunday Herald story on wind resource

Couldn't resist the opportunity to link to http://www.sundayherald.com/mostpopular.var.2509982.mostviewed.blown_away_by_the_north_sea.php">this story from the Sunday Herald this week.  The gist is that Atmos Consulting has access to NASA wind data, which they appear to have processed to review the wind resource and potential energy capture from sites for Third Round offshore windfarms.

I was called up to comment on the analysis, and inevitably the quote is rather simpler than the half hour conversation I had with the journo.

Picking winners...

Redfield Consulting has just published its new review of the marine energy sector, rating 120 wave and tidal devices on dimensions of technical and commercial feasibility.  We've developed an objective scoring system, which hopefully takes woolly judgement out of the equation.

Technical feasibility: "can the device work?"

Our technical feasibility scores are determined by clear concept definition for the device, lab and tank testing, and ideally prototyping at large scale in the sea.

Commercial feasibility: "can the device operate and make money?"

Our scoring system on commercial feasibility tries to score whether the device has addressed the key questions of survivability, reliability and accessibility, as well whether the device developer has accessed third party investment, the breadth of management team and obviously whether commercial projects are under way or planned.

We're interested in your views on the scoring system and on how further discrimination can be introduced as more and more devices start full scale deployment.

We had lots of interesting feedback at the All-Energy Show, not least an impassioned plea for inclusion of a points score for greater swept area for tidal stream devices.  We'd love to hear what you, the device developer and investment community think about development of the scoring system.

The report is available now: please feel free to contact us at Redfield Consulting (inforedfieldconsulting.co.uk, and we can let you have more information.  And we plan to keep it up to date, introducing a time dimension so we can all see which devices are evolving fastest.

And the winners at the moment?...you'll have to get the report to find that out!

All-Energy triumph

Another triumphant All-Emergy conference comes to an end. Very busy and very businesslike. All in all excellent. Get it in your diary for next year!


Apologies for brevity - posted from my iPhone

London Array green light

So, the proposed further enhancement to ROCs (offering 2 ROCs/MWh to projects signing contracts by March 2010) seems to have been enough to push Eon, Dong and Masdar into committing to the London Array project (or at least phase 1 of it).

The companies have announced that the project will cost €2.2 billion (around £2 billion) and will have initial capacity of 630 MW.  This makes the construction cost around £3.17/MW installed - higher than the announced per MW cost on Greater Gabbard, suggesting that supply chain constraints are not easing particularly for developers.  

 

REH gives up on CETO and gets £30 million

First an apology to regular blog readers for the recent silence.

We're back.  

There's an interesting news story here that Renewable Energy Holdings (listed on the London Stock Exchange as REH), has sold its wave energy Intellectual Property rights to Carnegie for £30 million (in shares in Carnegie).

The CETO technology is among the more developed wave technologies, having spent some time in the water at largish scale in Australia, so this is an interesting value indication for other companies in the space which are looking to monetise their IP.