Access to funding, a coherent long-term strategy and greater collaboration are required make wave power work for the UK, says a new report. 

Hayley Dunning Wave energy could contribute significantly to the UK’s future energy mix, but only if the mistakes of the past are not repeated, say Imperial College London and Strathclyde University researchers in a report launched today.

Despite £200m of public funds being invested in research, development and demonstration (RD&D) since 2000 the technology has yet to reach commercialisation and be widely deployed in the UK. In the report University of Strathclyde and Imperial College London researchers highlight key factors behind the failure of wave power technology to mature over the past 15 years, including poor understanding of the challenge, a policy landscape that failed to keep pace, lack of sharing between technology developers and lack of appropriate testing facilities.

They conclude lessons learned from this experience have led to a major reconfiguration of support for UK wave energy innovation, including the redesign of government RD&D programmes (e.g. Wave Energy Scotland), new networks of key stakeholders and the addition of new world-class test facilities (e.g. FloWaveTT).

The report’s authors say these changes mean the UK is much better placed to deliver a commercial wave energy device but warn success is threatened by wider political developments, not least Brexit and its impact on innovation funding and international collaboration.

Professor Jim Skea, Chair in Sustainable Energy in the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, said: “Following the Paris climate agreement there is a critical need to improve our understanding of how to accelerate low-carbon energy innovation in the most effective manner possible.

“The report points towards two weaknesses in wave innovation that can be remedied: first the lack of convergence on a dominant design that has been the key to success for other renewable technologies and, second, fragmentation of support across many overlapping schemes.

Click here to read more and access the report