£10m boost for British Sea Power
Photo of Glenelg, Scotland, by Dave Sag and used with permission.
IEEE Spectrum is reporting, in a story “£10 Million Sea Power Challenge“, on a new initiative by the Scottish Government to boost research into technologies that generate power from the sea.
Scotland is finalizing the terms of a contest in wave and tidal energy that takes inspiration from the prize that prompted Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight in 1927 and successors like the X Prizes and the Virgin Earth Challenge. The aim of the contest is to make ocean energy more than just a technical curiosity and, not so incidentally, give the country’s inventors and entrepreneurs a boost in an area where they have some obvious advantages–suitable geography, friendly government policies, and a head start in engineering.
Dubbed the Saltire Prize, after the cross that is the central element in Scotland’s flag, the prize of £10 million (about US $16 million) will be awarded in five years. Contestants will need the time to devise and demonstrate their technology because, by all accounts, Saltire is a very challenging challenge, so much so that only a Scottish company may be able to win it.
“To win the prize,” the rules say, “entrants must demonstrate, in Scottish waters, a commercially viable wave or tidal energy technology with a minimum output of 100 gigawatt-hours over a two-year period–using only the power of the sea. The winner will be judged to be the best overall technology after consideration of cost, environmental sustainability, and safety.”
The transition from powering our lives by burning fossil fuels to lives powered by renewable resources is going to require considerable investment and innovation. Prizes like this go a long way to stimulating the kind of entrepreneurial initiatives that will speed that transition. Just as the stone age did not end for lack of stones, so the age of dirty oil, coal and gas burning will surely come to an end, well before those resources are truly depleted. Whaling didn’t end because the world ran out of whales, or because the world suddenly started to care about our seep sea cousins. Whaling ended because lamp-oil became redundant due to a technology shift. So too with fossil fuels. When clean power hits price parity with fossil fuels, and that’s not far away now, and when energy density of batteries, fuel cells and other means of storing and transporting power improves just a little bit more, we’ll see a wholesale shift from centralised, ‘broadcast’ power, to decentralised ‘peer-to-peer’ power supplies. And won’t that just be great! — DS