24 MARCH 2004

Mr Philip Wolfe, Mr Iain Dorrity, Mr Max Carcas and Dr Tony Trapp

  Q460  Lord Methuen: One of the problems facing marine energy as compared to wind, which is really now a mature industry, is that there is still no consensus of the best way of generating power from either tidal stream or wave. Do you see this as a problem and if so how will it be resolved? I am personally very sceptical. I have had a look at your web sites so I know what these two things look like. I am a bit sceptical about the long term viability of reciprocating mechanisms in the water.

  Mr Carcas: I think, yes, there are a lot of different concepts out there and it seems like every retired engineer sitting in the bath has come up with an idea for a wave energy converter in the past. I think the situation is somewhat analogous to wind where you had not just this horizontal axis, three-bladed machine that you see today; you had vertical axis machines, Darius type of machines, vortex machines, two-bladed, one-bladed machines, lots of different types and nobody knew really what was going to be the ultimate winner. I think part of the process has been commercial investment and commercial partners deciding which horse to back and I think part of the process has also been the adoption of standards and measurement against those standards. Again, looking at the wind industry, what the Danes did was they set up the Ris' Test Centre in Denmark to validate the performance claims of manufacturers, which enables commercial investment to proceed because you could say, "This is what I expect to produce and this is what I did produce." In a way what we have done here in the UK is a very good step with the Marine Energy Test Centre in Orkney, taking a leaf out of the wind industry's book. So I think that is part of the package, really, in selecting, but it comes down to the market really to do that.

  Q461  Lord Methuen: Are you also looking at rotary machines as well as reciprocating, for tidal?

  Dr Trapp: Perhaps I can answer that. I think it is inevitable, to answer your question, that you do get the range of technologies that you do at the moment because it is a very early stage. We have probably as many doubts about reciprocation as you do and certainly we are interested in rotating machines as well. What we can guarantee is, for the relatively small amount of money which has been spent on EB projects, we have learned an enormous amount about the resource and we will be much better off, whatever technology we end up using, as a result of that work. We have a very valuable resource and we have to find some way of exploiting it. Oscillation has some big advantages from our point of view in relation to tide. We do not need to go into all the details now but there are significant advantages. There are some disadvantages and I, probably like you, have some reservations about a reciprocating device, but there are significant advantages. We have to prove what we can do. We have already operated Stingray for two years in Shetland. We have learned a lot and what we have learned so far leads us to believe that the device we are developing can be commercially attractive. It will take a long time. I keep emphasising that this is a slow and expensive business. We are developing new power station technology and if we are allowed to do it we have absolutely no doubt that we can do it in a reasonably short period of time. It will not be cheap and it will not be quick and there will be risk and expense on the way.

  Mr Wolfe: Not present on the team here is another British company in the forefront of their field which does have a rotating tidal stream machine, very much like a windmill underwater.

  Chairman: Thank you very much. May we move on to photovoltaics. Lord Tombs.

  Q462  Lord Tombs: I wonder what entry points and what significant contribution you see PV making in the medium term, by which let us say 7 to 10 years?

  Mr Dorrity: I think in the medium term we see the building integrated PV making a major impact where some of the costs of the PV modules can be offset by replacing existing building materials, such as roof tiles or cladding materials on office buildings. The other factor is that already today there are some stand-alone applications of PV where you are remote from the grid. More than a kilometre away from the grid, even for a domestic application, PV is considered to be more cost-effective. Today within city centres you will be aware of the advent of the solar powered parking meter where even though you are close to the grid the cost of that installation is cheaper.

  Q463  Lord Lewis of Newnham: How far are you using electricity as your basic starting point in the whole of this sort of scale? You remarked earlier, I think, that in fact heat was not included in the ROC, as it were. How far is PV also influenced by this particular problem, because a large amount of it is in translation into heat rather than into electricity, surely?

  Mr Dorrity: Sure, but then there is the additional solar thermal technology, where you can use the sun's infra-red radiation for heating hot water and there is no doubt that that is tremendously effective as well. We are just talking about PV converting the visible light to electricity.

  Q464  Lord Tombs: I do not think you answered the second part of my question, which was the size of the contribution you saw being made over the next 7 to 10 years.

  Mr Dorrity: I think perhaps it will be similar to hydro in 2020.

  Lord Tombs: That is a curious analogy.

  Q465  Baroness Sharp of Guildford: Earlier on you were talking about the developments in Japan and elsewhere, I think America, on PV. Are we benefiting from the developments which have been made over there? Are we going to pick up the technology?

  Mr Dorrity: From our specific company's perspective, we are certainly benefiting because 50 per cent of our production goes to Japan and the other 50 per cent goes to Germany. So we are certainly benefiting there.

  Q466  Baroness Sharp of Guildford: Is there a technology transfer back the other way at all in so far as technologies being advanced over there?

  Mr Dorrity: Recently one of the major Japanese companies has announced it is going to set up a module manufacturing plant in the UK but to date there is no manufacturing of crystalline silicon solar cells in the UK; all cells are imported.

  Q467  Lord Tombs: I would still like a slightly more definitive answer, if I may. You have ambitions. Let us deal with those. Over the next 7 years—presumably you are talking now about photovoltaic roofs on large buildings, office blocks, hospitals, and so on. What market penetration do you think you can make with the current level of support that ROCs provide?

  Mr Dorrity: I do not know if you have got a figure for that?

  Mr Wolfe: By 2010 we would expect photovoltaics to still be a very, very small contributor.

  Q468  Lord Tombs: Yes, that is why I went further.

  Mr Wolfe: They do not really benefit from the ROC scheme because the ROC scheme is really predicated around large-scale generation feeding back into the grid, whereas photovoltaic is particularly well suited for much smaller scale generation, of which the vast majority is used on site by whoever has installed the system. So the ROC system does not really benefit photovoltaics to any meaningful effect, but we would certainly see the prospective contribution by 2020 as being around maybe 5 per cent of overall renewables.

  Q469  Chairman: I think our time is unfortunately up. May I, on behalf of the Committee, thank you very much indeed for coming along this afternoon and sharing your experience and wisdom with us. We have not asked all the questions that we would have wished. Would you mind if we wrote to you and asked you for further information? I think we are particularly interested in the improvements that you would like to see made to the ROCs scheme but maybe other questions as well.

  Mr Wolfe: We would be delighted. Thank you for sparing us the time to express our views and we would be very happy to submit further information in written form.

  Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.