Renewable Energy
Explaining the work his company is focusing on, Murphy fi rstly mentions that the UK is blessed with a very valuable ocean resource due to its tides. “What we try to do is extract energy from the tidal systems,” he begins. “T e beauty of it as a marine renewable energy is that it is entirely predictable – it has not got the intermittency issues that need to be addressed in other renewable forms, such as solar and wind. But that said, there are lots of challenges to face in terms of making a valuable contribution to the overall renewable energy portfolio. To harness the potential power involves putting devices into very harsh environments. T e ability of these devices to withstand those conditions is a key part of the work that companies such as mine are doing to establish whether we can really take advantage of this resource.” Murphy explains that if such work does
prove fruitful, “It will be fantastic! If we can take the tidal resource just around the UK coastline, that could contribute 5 to 10% of the UK’s electricity requirements in future. If you add to that the potential for extracting energy from waves rather than just tides, then the number is closer to 20%.”
Go with the fl ow Much work needs to be done before we can start to achieve the kind of results Murphy predicts. Unlike others in the sector that are focusing on what’s known as ‘tidal range’ – capturing tidal water in a lagoon or behind a barrage and generating power as the water fl ows in and out of the structure – Murphy and his team at Tidal Energy Limited are focusing on tidal stream. “Around headlands and through narrow channels, as the tidal sequences naturally fl ow, water
Water rates W
hen it comes to the cost of projects such as Murphy’s and the predicted ROI, the waters are somewhat murky. Murphy admits that “it’s a
long road.” His fi rm’s funding status comes in two forms; his shareholders and a company called Eco2 Ltd. He explains: “Eco2 is backed by high net worth individuals. It’s a project development company that has worked in the renewable energy sector. Most of its work is in biomass, but it decided to explore opportunities for marine renewable energy so made an investment in Tidal Energy Ltd.”
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gets accelerated and what we are doing is putting an underwater windmill on the seabed to extract the vast energy that is carried in those fast fl owing tidal streams,” he explains.
T
he issue of intellectual property (IP) is vitally important to Murphy’s vision. Indeed it pretty
much forms his entire business case. “The value in our company is in the ownership of our technology,” he states. “We’re not a company that wants to build a factory to build large numbers of these turbine devices. Instead, what we aim to do is contract out, licence out the manufacture. The value to us is concentrated in the IP.”
For his fl agship project, Murphy and his team assessed the UK to see where the tidal stream had good potential and he settled on an area called Ramsey Sound off Pembrokeshire, Southwest Wales. As the water in the Sound changes direction – which happens four times a day here – it is accelerated through a channel. So a couple of years ago, Murphy set out to put a turbine right in the middle of that fl ow to try and extract the energy. So, where is the project today? “Well,
we’ve built the turbine,” reveals Murphy proudly.” We fi nished construction of the device, which we’ve named the DeltaStream, in late summer 2014, completed all the commissioning work for it in October and since then have been waiting for a suitable weather window to have the opportunity to install it in Ramsey Sound.
It’s just as well that ample funding is available;
projects in this area do not come cheap. Murphy reveals that his Ramsey Sound project has a total current spend in the region of £13 -14million in developing, building and getting the device ready for test. “It’s an expensive process, and a long one,” he says pragmatically. “But we believe that the opportunities are considerable and my shareholders have the appetite to go the distance because of the prospect for the renewable energy portfolio. They are investing because they foresee they can get a good return on it. How that manifests itself ultimately is a little too early to say.” ●
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