The Crown Estate launch new project investigating UK wave and tidal Strategic Areas

Around the coastlines of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, the UK has significant wave and tidal stream energy resources, with potential to meet 15-20% of national energy demand. Technologies to generate electricity from these resources are currently under development, with companies currently demonstrating prototype devices with unit capacities of around 1 MW. While it will be some time before projects comprising large arrays of devices are commercially viable, due to the need to grow the technologies’ performance track records, the industry is already starting to plan such projects.

The Crown Estate are also taking a longer term view, towards large-scale development of multiple gigawatts of projects elsewhere around the coast. They want to develop a better understanding, shared with the industry and government, of the true potential for such development, such that when the industry is ready to take up this potential, The Crown Estate can undertake leasing to award further development rights. They are now running a project to do this.

The Crown Estate call areas of seabed that have potential for large-scale development of wave and/or tidal stream energy ‘strategic areas’ or ‘key resource areas’. One such area is already defined: the Pentland Firth and Orkney waters. The objective of the project is to identify further strategic areas, elsewhere around Scotland and the rest of the UK, defining their geographic areas (in map coordinates) and estimating the development potential (in terms of potential generating capacity, gigawatts) that these areas could hold.

As part of its UK-wide wave and tidal programme, The Crown Estate is leading this project, working in partnership with various organisations including Marine Scotland. The project is running between October 2011 and March 2012.
The deliverables, to be published on The Crown Estate website, will be as follows:
 A map of UK strategic areas for future wave and tidal energy leasing, identifying the potential scales of development;
 A commentary on how this map was created, referencing the data and information employed and any needs for further research.

How you can get involved
Register for e-mail updates on the project by contacting olivia.burgess@thecrownestate.co.uk with a short message, including ‘Strategic Area project’ in the subject line and giving your full contact details. For more details of the project download the project brief here.