A new energy fund in the UK is looking to improve wave and tidal energy technologies and help put them into use. The new Marine Renewables Proving Fund contains about $36 million worth of new grants.
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Marine Renewables Proving Fund
The main objective of the fund is to help commercial developers get their technology to a stage where it can be installed. At that point, they can apply for additional funding through the Marine Renewables Deployment Fund.
The new fund was formally launched yesterday, but it is part of the UK’s renewable energy strategy which was released in July.
The UK developed this fund after it hadn’t awarded any money from the approximately $82 million Marine Renewables Deployment Fund and the Conservative UK Shadow Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change, Greg Clark, criticized the UK government. He brought to the surface that the government had given about 20 times more subsidies to the coal industry than the marine technology industry.
The Carbon Trust, also managing the Marine Renewables Deployment Fund, is in charge of managing the Marine Renewables Proving Fund. It did award nearly $818,000 from the deployment fund just in the past few weeks “to marine energy firms Pelamis Wave Power and Marine Current Turbines to help them develop more cost effective means of installing their technologies.”
UK Leading the Way with Wave Energy
The UK is a leader in wave technology, but it is looking to do much more in the future. As James Murray of BusinessGreen states: “a quarter of the world’s wave energy technologies are already developed in the UK, while the marine energy sector has the potential to contribute £2 billion a year to the country’s economy by 2050, employing 16,000 people in the process.”
According to Energy and Climate Change Minister, Lord Hunt, the new proving fund will help to “get [marine projects] off the drawing board and into the water, taking them a vital step closer to full scale commercial viability.” We will see.
Image Credit: Hamed Saber via flickr under a Creative Commons license
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