Sir, — Perhaps the main attraction of wave power is its relative availability and predictability when compared to other green energy. I would like to offer a view of where it stands.
It is very straightforward to establish the total energy available from wave power, and it is certainly immense. In the early 2000s, our State gave great encouragement — “talking the talk” — to development of possible technologies.
Excellent work was done by the State sector to characterise the wave regimes in a number of offshore Ireland locations, providing essential data for potential technology developers. The educational side in engineering and hydrodynamics was also largely catered for. Some 15-20 Irish ventures entered the fray to develop a number of different technical approaches.
The funding made available was on the one hand generous but in practice proved unwieldy and, as it used an EU model suited only to academia, not as helpful as it was sold to be.
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A lot of the enthusiasm for this new sector came from people with no technical appreciation of the complexities and barriers facing the technologies, while most of us “practitioners” greatly underestimated them.
A number of these companies (and I was co-founder of one), made progress and produced power from the waves at small scale, and some were decidedly among the world best. Private investment, in Ireland and state plus private in the UK (specifically Scotland) and elsewhere, heavily backed a few such technologies, even into the hundreds of millions.
There were development issues, however, that might have been overcome but in 2010-2016 or so it became increasingly clear that wave electricity was far from being grid competitive.
Most of us concluded that, even allowing for development of materials and technologies and the benefits of mass production, competitiveness was and remains a long way off.
Wave energy in the foreseeable future will be used in some niche applications — in the case of remoteness from alternatives or possibly some desalination applications, and a small number of developers, including Irish, continue their work. It cannot play a significant role in supplying national energy.
The foregoing refers only to kinetic energy from waves. There are other technologies, such as based on thermal effects or osmosis, which may be taken further elsewhere but are not relevant to Ireland — but they are not true wave energies in any case.
Please note that tidal energy is a separate category. There is a small amount of it in use, it is not nearly as challenging technically, there is far less of it than waves, but it approaches grid competitiveness in some locations. — Yours, etc,
PATRICK DUFFY,
Chartered engineer,
Blackrock,
Co Dublin.
