Gallery: UK Marine Energy Conference wrap-up

The first UK Marine Energy Conference brought the leaders of the UK marine energy to Glasgow on July 5, 2016, acting as a forum for industry leaders to discuss the reasons and ways in which to accelerate the progress of marine energy sector.

The conference agenda discussed recent tidal and wave projects, current and future policy, current challenges and possible solutions, the latest technology and test sites.

Julie Steel from The Scottish Government opened the day focusing on marine energy policy with Scotland as the case study. This was followed by Lara Moore from Ashfords who provided a review of and necessary advice for marine licensing in the UK.

Jason Hayman of Sustainable Marine Energy, gave a presentation on SME’s floating tidal energy platform technology PLAT-O.

After that, FloWave’s Stuart Brown and SmartBay Ireland’s Eoin Nicholson both discussed their test sites in the technology session, drawing upon their experience with the industry’s biggest players.

The projects’ session saw presentations from some of the top developers from all over the UK, featuring Graham Foster from Marine Power Systems (MPS) who discussed MPS’ WaveSub technology and how it has the potential to address marine energy’s most significant issues, such as operating costs.

Minesto’s CEO Martin Edlund focused on site development and how to build short and long term customer relationships.

Martin Edlund said: “The title of my presentation was ‘Demands on site development from a Deep Green perspective’ and the idea was to present another approach to project and technology development.

“Considering the unique characteristics of our technology, we claim that we operate in a niche of our own in the tidal energy industry. This obviously affects how we address the process of maturing the technology as well as how we are building relationships with our first customers.”

Photo courtesy of UK Marine Energy Conference

The session also featured an update from Robert East on OpenHydro’s latest projects, touching on their technological innovations.

In the final session of the day, the speakers reflected on the challenges the industry needs to consider and how they could be overcome.

Peter Fraenkel from Fraenkel Wright discussed the relationship between rated power and profitability for tidal turbines, concluding that ‘big makes money – small makes losses’.

Adam Schink presented the National Oceanography Centre’s Marine Robotics Innovation Centre, and how their marine autonomous systems can remove the danger from subsea applications, among many other benefits.

The University of Edinburgh’s Claire Haggett concluded the conference by giving the presentation on community responses.

The exhibition area hosted most of the networking throughout the day.

As well as hosting the event with conference sponsors Ashfords LLP, and Natural Resources Wales, the UK Marine Energy Conference has been organized with the support from a number of leading industry and marine energy organisations, such as Energy at KTN, Energy Technologies Institute, IMarEST, Scottish Energy Association, Marine Energy Pembrokeshire, Community Energy Wales, Marine South East Limited, CASE, Maribe, and WavEC.