In all this holiday activity (!) of mine, I quite forgot to mention the awesome news that the Scottish firm Ocean Power Delivery (of whom we spoke before) have gone and got themselves a €8Million contract to supply their clever pelamis sea snake to the portuguese.
The company teamed up with Portugal-based Enersis to plan the farm just over a year ago - a partnership aimed at taking advantage of financial incentives set up by the Portuguese government.In other renewable energy news: Wind Turbines may harm Eagles. Stick them in the water and be done with all these (Eagles / Seagulls / Bluebottles love climate change) whiners. In fact stick them in the water too. And "much smaller hourly and day-to-day variations than other renewable resources such as wind or solar" seems like a good idea too.The group is also working with ScottishPower, but head of business development Max Carcas said it was not yet possible to build a large-scale wave farm in UK waters. "The government's financial policy still needs tweaking," he said.
The Portuguese order is the first commercial transaction for wave turbines, beating plans by rival Ocean Power Technology (OPT), which is planning to launch a project off the north coast of Spain.
But OPD's turbine is 15 times more powerful than its rival's, and Carcas said it was as advanced as wind turbines were six years ago. The technology is called Pelamis, and was fine-tuned off Orkney.
Carcas added: "The most exciting thing is that this will be the first commercial wave farm in the world." The deal followed a series of meetings between British and Portuguese officials. - The Scotsman
Posted by Paul in Energy Politics at May 25, 2005 02:23 AM | 0 Comments
