Mastering marine energy with Neil Kermode (Managing Director @ EMEC)

Are we aiming for grid-scale wave energy that is a part of the generation mix? Or are we aiming for small-scale stuff that you can connect to houses and remote places where you can't get power to through conventional methods?

The site we've got is about a kilometer and a half wide. We get half a billion tons of seawater an hour go through that site. It roars through there.

Love that. Old wind energy.

NEIL KERMODE: Yeah. But the estimates are that you could get something in a region of about 10% of the UK's electricity supply out of tides if you use the sites that we know about around the UK at the moment. We're on a spinning globe, and it's the effect of the sun and the moon and all the rest of it on the skin of water on the outside of planet Earth.

I can tell you, when the tides going to be running 1,000 years from today, right? [INAUDIBLE]

MAN: That's pretty cool, isn't it?

Hello, everybody. Izzy back again to introduce this episode of Mojo the Podcast. In this episode, we're joined by Neil Kermode from the European Marine Energy Center based up in Orkney.

If you're liking the podcast, please consider hitting Like, Subscribe, and all of those good buttons. It really means the world to us. Let's jump in.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

OK, this is the first person we've had, I think, in the office from Orkney, the island of Orkney. Neil, do you want to talk about that before we get into energy stuff? That's pretty unusual.

Well, it's a dangerous thing because we do tend to bore people to death about Orkney because it's such a great place.

I moved up there 18 years ago for the job at EMEC. And it's such a buzz. It's just great because there are 22,000 people. We've produced more energy than we've needed from electricity every year from renewables since 2013.

Oh, nice.

Yeah, so we're already pushing the envelope quite a lot. And it's just great to be part of it.

And is there an interconnector to Orkney from the mainland?

Yeah, there are two at the moment. Effectively, there's a 275 [? KEV ?]

line that goes up the middle of the top of Scotland up to Dune Rae where the nuclear reactors were.

And then there's a couple of extension cables basically that run out across the Pentland Firth to Orkney. They're about 2 by 30 megawatts apiece or something like that.

Oh, wow. And do you have generation on the island, like fossil--

sorry. I know you've got wind and solar, but do you have fossil-fueled legacy generation too?

Yeah, we've got a power station, which is a diesel power station that's run by SSE.

MAN: Wow.

And it runs occasionally, so they get through the diesel You can see the smoke coming out of the top of it, which is really annoying.

How many megawatts is that? It's like a peaking plant size, or is it--

No, it was a baseload plant, really. So I think it's 25 megawatts or so. They've decommissioned chunks of it over time because originally it was a completely islanded system.

And then they put a first cable in, about 30 meg, and they'd run it occasionally. And they put the second cable in. Now they run it very, very occasionally.

But we had a power outage or a cable outage the other year, had to bring it back online again.

I guess that's a lot of diesel.

NEIL KERMODE: It is. And the thing that's going to be going on soon is the scale of renewables that are in now and are planned to go in as well means that there's a 220-megawatt. I think it is further link due to be going in. And we're waiting for an announcement imminently from Ofgem and SSE about when that's going in.

Very exciting.

I rate island life in general. I think it's a big move--

a big, bold move, unless you're in Ireland and you're born there, for people to move to these places like the Channel Islands or other Scottish islands or whatever.

I think I fancy it, though, one day. You know everybody. I guess--

can you still get all the stuff that you can get on the mainland?

Pretty much. Yeah, pretty much. Screwfix deliver there, so you're sorted, aren't you?

Can you get Amazon Prime?

Oh, I don't know. I haven't gone that far. But yeah, I'm sure you can. B&Q don't deliver for some reason, which is really weird.

As long as you can get Prime, I'm there. Anyway, we're not here to talk about Orkney, even though we probably could for a whole episode. We're here to talk about marine stuff. So we are here to talk about energy and the work that you do in energy, and specifically in the marine world.

Big, salty places which are very quite difficult to build stuff in. But there's a hell of a lot of energy out there to capture.

So Neil, would you mind, before we get started, just talk about what EMEC is and how long you been there and what they work on.

OK. So EMEC is the European Marine Energy Center. We were set up in 2003. So technically, it's our 20th birthday this year.

Happy birthday.

Thank you very much indeed. And we were set up initially to work on wave energy, and then subsequently we extended to work on tidal energy. And I joined the company in 2005 when we were just starting to put the infrastructure in for tidal. So the way the Test Center works, which is what EMEC is.

It's--

better phrase that.

EMEC's a test center for wave and tidal energy machines. And we've got infrastructure which allow people to test their machines. So basically, cables that run out into the sea to where there are big waves or big tides.

And people bring their machines along and plug them on the end of our cables. The energy flows through our cables, into our substation, and then into the grid.

OK. So it's European center for marine energy stuff. And you've got your own infrastructure. And if I build a new tidal or wave energy thing that I want to test out, I can come up to your island and plug it in and see how it gets on in the sea.

Effectively, yes. But you've got to be pretty organized in what you're doing. So this stuff is basically on the edge of the grid. So we're are grid-scale machines. These are couple of megawatt machines that we're plugging in.

But we've also got some scale sites which allow you to have your idea that large prototype scale. And so you can put things in that are tens of kilowatts as well on some sites and then go out and graduate into the big stuff.

How do one do this? Because tidal and wave sound very similar, but I bet they're very, very different. So the basics from a Birmingham boy who lives a long way from the sea, right?

So how do we do this? Should we start with tidal? What was the first one?

Well, we started with wave.

MAN: Let's start with wave then. Let's talk about that. So what is--

what is wave energy?

What's wave energy? OK.

I've got an idea, but--

So wave energy is basically old wind energy. And what happens is the wind blows across the sea, and as it does so it toughens the surface of the sea. And eventually, those roughness bits join into waves, and those waves come downwind and--

Love that. "Old wind energy."

Yeah.

MAN: Second pressing.

Yeah. And that's quite useful because often wave energy turns up a few days after wind. So there's a degree of smear that goes on as well. And the other thing is that we capture the wind that happened out in the mid-Atlantic. So it doesn't have to be the wind that's happening here. It's the wind happened over there some time ago, and it comes here in a big storage lump called a wave.

Now, those lumps can be pretty big, with the biggest waves we've had on our site we measured 18 meters high.

Wow.

So that's slopping in the second floor of most buildings. It's a big wave.

So how do you measure--

how do you measure this stuff? I know you said 18 meters. That's how high the wave is. But I imagine there's a lot of stuff under the surface as well.

So how do we think about--

before we get into what the techniques to capture this energy are, how do we think about this type of energy?

So what you see on the wave is just that--

it's just the visible bit, clearly, but there's stuff going on, as you say, underneath. And effectively, the particles of water move in a circular motion. So the waves hand their energy on from molecule to molecule. The molecules don't move themselves.

The molecules just hand the energy on one to another. There's a circular motion that's going on.

And so the waves are the height and the period no the distance between the waves. And that's a function of how much energy is being put in the wave and the depth of water and things. So the waves that we get in North Atlantic will be different to waves you'll get, say, in the Pacific or in the South Atlantic.

So the waves themselves have got a degree of shape to them, and that then gives you some indication of the energy that's there.

So ball park.

Where you guys are set up, how many waves do you get per minute--

do you do waves per minute? WPM? Is that a thing?

That's an interesting way of putting it. God, I haven't done the maths in that. But they're probably 10-second periods. So it's 5 or 6, that sort of scale.

I'm doing some really rough calculations--

That's good live maths. That's good live maths.

Well, it might be if it's right.

[LAUGHTER]

And the waves themselves, they--

obviously, I said 18 is our highest, but most of them, they average in the 3- to 4-meter mark.

So every 10 seconds or so, you're getting a 3- or 4-meter wave coming into Orkney, hitting the island, and we want to capture that energy somehow. And it comes in circles sort of thing.

NEIL KERMODE: Yeah.

OK. So how do you capture the energy?

So what you're really dealing with is potential energy, really. So you can either build something on the surface that floats on the surface, and as the wave goes underneath it so that it hinges or articulates in some way, and that motion of the hinge can be resisted by hydraulics or various other things. So you can work against the motion of this flexing activity that's going on.

Going up, down, up, down, up, down kind of thing.

Or even it's going--

there's a bending action that's going on. So the waves are going underneath the machine, so it follows the contours, and so there's an articulation activity. That's one. Second way you can do it is the up-down, up-down side of things.

So you can have something that is reacting against a mass that's underwater. And the top is moving up and down, but the bottom stays put. And the difference in distance allows hydraulics or various power takeoffs to work.

So those are the two main ways. But when you get into shallow water, the circular motion starts to scuff along the seabed and it becomes elliptical. And it then becomes much of surge in and out. You go to the shore, you see the waves come towards you and go away.

MAN: The undercurrent. When you're swimming and you feel it.

Yeah, and it pulls you forward and pushes you back towards the beach. So putting something in the water that stands up a bit like a gate that then folds backwards and forwards with the waves is another way of doing it. So there's a whole bunch of different ideas. And there's a fourth one, which is--

there's one company been working on it, which is an eccentric mass.

What is eccentric? I know what eccentric means as in a eccentric Stephen Fry intellectual. But we're not talking about that right now.

Off-center, I think.

MAN: Off-center.

So if you've got a weight--

if you've got a wheel, and instead of the axle being in the middle you put the axle slightly off to one side, it would be wobbly.

So you can imagine that wheel. If it was heavy and it was in the hull of a vessel, the vessel will go over the wave. And as it's pointing uphill, the wobbly bit wants to go--

the heavy bit wants to go to the back. And as it goes over the wave, it wants to go to the front.

So you can imagine you could end up with a procession of this off-center wheel turning. And there's a machine--

MAN: Just wobbling around.

Yeah. That's another way of doing it. So there's a bunch of different ways to get the energy out of the sea. But at the moment, they're not all proven, and it's still very much an R&D space in that.

OK. And which one is most of the time and effort going into? If you think about, for example, most technologies, there are a number of ways you can do it, but there's one or two that most of the money goes into. How does that look for in the world of waves?

It's still really wide open.

So there have been some significant bits of progress made in the past. Some quite big machines were installed, half a megawatt scale. But generally speaking, the business models on those didn't stack up. So a lot of people have gone back to the drawing board.

And there's been a program by a company called Wave Energy Scotland who have effectively been able to procure different types of devices and take them through an R&D process. And two of those machines recently came out at the end of that program and are in the water--

or one's in the water in Orkney now, and one was in the water until about six weeks ago.

And they have been the culmination of an R&D program. And they will now go onto bigger units which then will attract more investment and then eventually get to commercial. But we're still in that--

MAN: Still early days.

--those foot low--

foot--

foothill stuff.

Can we figure out how we describe--

can we find a reference point in size here somehow? So how much--

I'm really struggling to get my head around this. How big is a wave machine? And how many of them do you need to get a megawatt or a gigawatt or whatever?

So work on the machines we've had so far. We had a machine called Palamas in the water back about 10, 12 years ago.

MAN: Very cool name.

Yeah. It means sea snake in Greek, I think. So anyway, from recollection, it was the size of a five-carriage train. And that was a 750-kilowatt rated machine.

Wow. So these things are big, aren't they?

We had a machine called Oyster which was by a company called Aquamarine.

Not as cool a name, but--

it might be better.

And that was a bit--

that looked like a huge laptop, basically. It was on the seabed with a screen standing up, and the waves folded the screen backwards and forwards, best way to describe it. But by huge, the screen itself would have been--

I think it was 23 meters wide or 15 meters high.

Wow.

NEIL KERMODE: Moving back to the forwards in the North Atlantic.

And that was I think 800 kilowatts that was rated at.

And then we've got some machines in the water now which I'll say gone back to the drawing board a bit. There's a company called Motion Energy. And I think that machine at the moment is 15 kilowatts or so. So they've gone back to smaller scale.

But they're looking to find ways to supply power to remote activity, so like underwater well installations and telemetry and stuff like that.

Well, I was going to ask you about this. So what's the dream here? Is the dream that wave energy--

we'll talk about tidal in the second--

but wave energy specifically--

are we aiming for grid-scale wave energy that is a part of the generation mix that is supplying national grid and supplying our homes?

Or are we aiming for small-scale stuff that you can connect to houses and remote places where you can't get power to through conventional methods? What's the dream?

So I think the dream has changed a bit. So it was very much about the industrial-scale grid replacement stuff.

But that was found to be really pretty hard.

And so people have gone back to a scaling thing and trying to find where the market is. So there are people, say like Motion, are working at offshore installation support, be that a few kilowatts here and hundreds of kilowatts there.

And I think that's probably a place we're going to be for a little while. I think we will go back to the grid-scale stuff, but it's going to take a generation to get there because it's big and hard. And trying to get stuff in the sea is expensive. And it's just blooming hard.

So what's it like working in the sea? I used to spend a bit of time working on offshore stuff in wind and then gas.

And the thing that you're always fighting--

on something called fabric maintenance, which is just basically painting bits of metal--

just painting, painting, painting, painting, painting because it rusts and falls on everything from the handrails to bits of the foundations. Everything needed painting all the time.

So is that one of the big challenges for work in the sea and the projects that you work with?

Yeah, it is a significant material science challenge, and getting that right is really important. And the way we've done it to date has been we've generally built stuff out of steel and coated it up with paint. Well, once you worked out exactly what you want to do, it's likely we're going to go to different materials which won't corrode, so pultrusion and synthetic materials, things like that.

But at the moment, we are very much still in that build it and paint it approach. And I think one of the things we have to recognize with doing stuff at sea--

we were taught very clearly doing a bolt up on land will cost you a pound, doing it up at sea will cost you 10 pounds. Doing it underwater will cost you 100 pounds.

As in tightening a bolt.

NEIL KERMODE: That's sort of thing, yeah.

So for goodness' sake, try not to do it underwater. Try not to do it at sea. Do it on land once and then get it out there. And so that whole process. And there's a tie-back there to what's been happening with tide, but there's a real theme that's come out through the operations of tidal turbines, which has been, if you can get to it and maintain it, it's a lot easier than putting them underwater and then you have to drag them back out again.

So there are some real--

that subject is really, really important. And the maintainability is critical.

And before we get too tidal, I'm just thinking about the space. So can you give us an idea of what kind of investment and activity is happening in this space? So if you look at, for example, supply chains for solar and the investment, it's essentially 9% in the Far East, apart from now with the Inflation Reduction Act that's starting to change.

But a lot of the R&D has already happened. The cost curves have come right down. And now it's about deploying at scale and factories and manufacturing and all that. When you think about batteries, not as far along the cost curve reduction, I believe, as solar, and still lots of chemical things to figure out.

But again, we're in the mass production, "how do you build these things at scale and reduce cost?"

For tidal and for wave, what's that like? Who's investing in this? Who believes in it? Is it all public money, or is it private investors? And where are we on the s-curve?

The s-curve's the easy bit. So we're right at the start, really, in many ways. We've further along the curve with tidal, but we're still in very early stages. And for numbers, simple numbers, there have been--

my site has more machines on it than any other site anywhere in the world. We have 35 machines.

How many solar panels did somebody put out last year? Billions.

So we're a long way short on the curve. So we haven't had the opportunities that degree of repetition and that systemization. And we haven't really got to the point where we've focused in on, ah, that's the one that really That's what we do. OK, everybody, that's what we're doing.

So we're still in the bit of frontier land at the moment about that.

Who's investing in it? Yes, it has mainly been governments. But we have seen quite significant investments by others coming in. So for example, one of the tidal machines that we've got up at the moment, they did a big Abundance crowd raise.

So there was a lot of social interest in making that work. I think it was the largest crowd raise that Abundance had done. That was 6 million pounds or something. So there's public interest in it. But we've also seen that there's a degree of supply chain interest going on as well, where we're getting people starting to realize that, oh, hang on, we could put those machines out. We could do that.

So investments by OEM companies really getting involved, thinking, how do we make this a product line?

And it's a bit tentative because we've had a bit of that before, and then they walked away. But this time, it seems to be much more solid and people are staying with it. So it's going through an evolution at the moment. But it is very much government supported is a big piece of it.

It's hard, isn't it, because just comparing to--

you can't help but compare to other generation types, thinking about solar, for example. The way that you manufacture solar is it's basically done. You get the bit of--

you know the materials you need. You know how thin they need to be. You know how you lay them on. It's done.

But while there's still not one winning technology in particularly wave--

wow, I get confused--

wave right now, there's still some way to go. Let's talk about tidal because tidal has been in the news a lot. We had the big proj--

maybe you can talk about what tidal is, and then we'll talk about some of those projects. So what's the tidal deal?

So there are several bits that get talked about as tidal, so better separate those out because we're working on one of them and not some of the others. So the stuff we're working on--

I'll get shot for saying this because they don't like me saying it--

but it's a bit like underwater wind.

It passes through, it causes something to turn, and what you don't use just ends up over there. It just washes through the site.

There are other ways of taking energy out of the tides. So you can do something they did in France at La Rance and something they've done in Annapolis Royal in Canada, which is called building a barrage, where you find a local area--

the Severn has been talked about since the 1830s about building a dam across it.

When the tide comes in you, let the water flood the upstream area. And then when it's high water, you stop the dam. The tide goes out outside, and you've got the water held inside. Then you let it go, and it runs--

A bit like pumped hydro, but where the tide does the work.

NEIL KERMODE: Exactly that. And that's been happened. There's an example of that at Eling in Southampton, and the foundations for that are Saxon.

So we've done it for a while. It's been around. But that's not really where it's going at the moment because it's quite difficult to find the right site and it's disruptive to the sites as well.

The planning--

getting planning permission for something like. That would just be--

NEIL KERMODE: It's very difficult. So it is a thing, and things like the Severn Barrage have been talked about for a lot of years, and it could be a really big chunk of power if we want to do it. But that's not the space I'm in. I'm just going to leave that one over there because other people are going to get on with that probably--

maybe one day.

The other way you can do it is--

MAN: And that's called a barrage.

Barrage.

MAN: Barrage.

Yeah. And there's good examples. La Rance in France, it's been working since the 1970s, I think, and it paid itself back years ago. And it works, but you've got to find the right site. The other way you can do it is you can create tidal lagoons, which is basically you don't find a convenient bit of river outlet, but you can actually build the whole thing yourself.

You build a ring of a dam in the sea, and you allow that to fill up. And then you let the water drain out. Once again, same sort of process, but doesn't involve changing the way the water moves around the coast of some inlet somewhere. So that's another way you can do it.

But the main focus of attention at the moment is on the stuff I was talking about, starting with tidal stream. Tidal stream energy, so like the underwater wind turbines.

So barrage, lagoon, and stream, they're the three options we've got.

So we're working on the stream side of things. Now, you've got a couple of choices there as well in that you can either effectively hang your wind turbine from the underside of a floating vessel or plant it in the seabed as it sticks up into the water column. Those are your two choices. And then you can play with different types of wind turbine or turbines, either horizontal axis or vertical axis or a whole load of stuff.

But at the moment, most of the people are centering on--

or the two people who have got turbines on my site at the moment have both gone for floating turbines--

floating structure with the turbine underneath hanging down into the water column.

So it's a floating wind turbine, but turned 180, upside down.

NEIL KERMODE: Pretty much, that sort of thing. So the structures are less of a triangular things you're seeing with wind. They're more hull shapes. So one looks a bit like a boat.

One looks a bit like a submarine. Those are the two that are on there. And we've had some real progress made.

Particularly, there's a company called Orbital Marine Power who are on site at the moment.

And they have been generating for about a year and a half, I think. Well, they just take the machine off on Saturday to do some maintenance. But they've generated really well and extensively, and that's gone--

that's been really good.

How big are these machines in both size, so physical space, and in kilowatts or megawatts?

Electrical capacity, around about a megawatt to two megawatts. So we've got one machine which is a 1 and 1/2 megawatts. Another one's got two 1-megawatt rotors on it. So in total machines, 2 megawatt.

I think I saw a photo of that one. It looks a bit like a helicopter thing, but turned upside down.

Yeah, or it's often been likened a bit to some of the bits out of Star Wars and the X-fighters.

So this is basically a tube. I think it's 74 meters in length.

And the tube's then got a pair of wings on either side. And on the ends of the wing is the rotor system, the nacelle. And they can lower this into the water, and it turns as the water passes the machine.

And it's tied in on moorings at the front and the back.

What about the fish?

Because I think in wind turbines we worry a lot about birds and bats.

But we have the same problem, just underwater. What do the fish think about all this?

[LAUGHS]

Well, we've not interviewed any, so I can't give you what they think, but I'll tell you how they behave. So you don't tend to find fish in those areas, in the very strong tides. So the camera systems we've got underwater on some of the turbines show what seems to happen, and that is that when the--

The tides come and go.

When tide's in, it stops and turns around and goes back the other way. That period is called slack water.

There's no real movement. And you will tend to see fish around these devices and round things, and they often just feeding on bits of material that's washing through the site.

But as the tidal speeds picks up so they have to swim to stay in position, and the more the tidal speed picked up, the harder they got to swim. And eventually they go, you know what?

Exhausting, just swimming to stay still.

Exactly, so they don't bother. They're not that daft. So they'll go inshore. They go elsewhere.

So we don't--

and the point is that when the tides are running strong, that's when the turbines are turning. So we don't really think the fish and the turbines turning are there at the same time.

Now, it's really hard to measure exactly what does go on the water, but we're not really seeing problems. We're not seeing examples of a lot of dead fish somewhere or stunned--

we're just not seeing a problem.

But it's not just fish. It's things like seals and whales and basking sharks and other animals as well.

But we're looking really closely at this. We've done a whole lot of modeling and monitoring. We've had people with binoculars looking for extended periods, like months and months of looking at this.

What a job.

Well, there's worse places to do it.

But we're not seeing a negative impact. What we tend to see is, when you go out on site to go and do maintenance, the wildlife will keep away. And as soon as you leave, the wildlife comes back. So we're not really seeing--

we're looking assiduously to find if there are problems, but we're genuinely not finding problems.

I suppose you could put a net around--

well, the word "net" is probably quite triggering for fish.

MAN: I don't mean a net to catch them. If you're a fish listening to this, I'm not saying that. But something to stop fish from going in that still lets the water go back and forth, I guess. There's probably a cost to that, though on efficiency.

And there's other stuff. There's debris. There's weeds. There's bits of rope and all sorts of stuff in the water. So it would just clog up with that. So no.

Oh, right. You can't.

NEIL KERMODE: No, you wouldn't do that. So you leave it open. And the other thing is that the turbines are not confined.

Now, if you put them in a duct, there's then an edge where the turbine and the blade would be close to each other, and there's a sort of a cutting action. But they don't.

A meat grinder. Fish meat grinder.

So they're fairly small machines as well. The other thing is the blades are about 10 meters long.

And they're turning at about 15 revolutions a minute. So they're comparatively slow move, though our tip speeds are quite high. But given the density of the water and the fact that most animals are of a similar density to water, anything would just get washed around largely.

And the other thing is that animals have a habit of avoiding things that they don't know or are cautious about. So we genuinely haven't found a problem with anything that's going on so far. But we're going to keep looking because you put more and more of these machines in the water, there may be an edge effect we discover.

But we haven't found one yet, and we have been looking really hard. I spent 20 years scuba diving. That was my thing. That's why I got involved in tidal energy.

So I'm passionate about the marine environment. So I wouldn't be in this if I thought we were going to be causing--

Yeah, I'd imagine pretty much everybody is who's involved in this thing.

NEIL KERMODE: Yeah.

And I'd imagine that a lot of the other infrastructure, so putting cables on a seabed and getting power to shore, that's all pretty standard stuff, isn't it? We do that in offshore wind. We do it in offshore oil and gas. But I guess if you've got something floating around, that's going to move a cable around a lot.

Yeah.

Right. There's a lot of bits in there. So when we started, there wasn't even floating offshore wind, so we were very much pioneering where this was going. And one of the concerns was we put the cables on the seabed. Our seabed has no sediment on it because the water speed is so high, just scours the site of sediment.

MAN: Oh, really?

So it's pretty clean.

The site we've got is about a kilometer and a half wide. We get half a billion tons of seawater an hour go through that site. It roars through there. It goes through at about 8 knots or 4 meters a second. So it's a really intense energy source. So laying cables in that was a real unknown. How is this going to behave?

Oh, right.

We were worried about are they going to strum or vibrate?

So the cables sneak out into the tide. They don't go right angles to the tide. They ease out into the tide to make sure we don't end up with those effects. But the question--

and we've used those cables to help people get their first machines in.

So the next stage is, how do you get 2 machines in, or 3 or 5 or 10? And how do you cable those together? Do you daisy-chain them together? Do you have radial cables that go back to a central hub? There's a lot of stuff we've got to work out here yet. And so that's the stage we're going through now, where the single machines have proved themselves.

Can we get energy out of the tides? Yes. Tick. Got that one. How do you get more machines in?

How do you do it more reliably? And how do you maintain this stuff? Now, if you got 20, how do you get the one out of the middle if you need to go and repair it or something? There's a lot of stuff still to work through.

How much does all this cost? So I know we've got a long way to go on the cost side. And I feel a bit naughty asking this question when we have folks on this podcast who are from new technologies because the whole point is that you get the cost down.

NEIL KERMODE: Yeah, [INAUDIBLE].

But that doesn't mean I can't ask the question. So right now, where are we at with costs on both tidal and wave energy?

So tidal is the more mature and is making more progress and is coming out of R&D, starting to move towards the market. So we're pleased to see that the means by which the this technology is supported is through some government finance [INAUDIBLE]

of the contracts for difference processes, which is the system that operates in the UK for providing support for low-carbon technologies.

And a pot was carved out within that last one for tidal energy. And there was an agreed price of up to 212 pounds a megawatt hour, which is expensive compared with--

[INAUDIBLE]

NEIL KERMODE: Yeah, which--

understandable. In fact, the prices came in at about 178 pounds a megawatt hour.

MAN: Oh, wow.

So that was better. And there's another round which just closed a few days ago, and there'll be the announcements of the prices for that will get made in a few months' time, I expect.

How big was that auction, that CFD auction for you guys?

Well, I think there was a ring-fenced limit of 10 million pounds.

So I can't remember the numbers of how many megawatts that actually ended up putting in AR4 25 or so. That's--

really can't remember. But it's that's scale.

It's somewhere between 1 and 50, so around that number.

NEIL KERMODE: Yeah. But it's still small beer.

The UK's got, I don't know, 50 gigawatts online at the moment. So it's noise on the signal, isn't it? It's that sort of scale. So that's where we are with--

That's tidal--

not tidal barrage. I want to say--

NEIL KERMODE: Just stream. Tidal stream.

Yeah, or lagoon. It's the stream stuff. Whenever we say barrage, I think about garage and garage, which is the ultimate Birmingham question.

But yeah, so tidal stream. And so that's roughly 170 quid-ish per megawatt hour, but the numbers should be coming down over time.

Well, yeah. We think--

well, it has to because we don't have a right to do this. We need to compete with the market. So we know we've got to get there. But the thing is, the only way you get the price down is repetition.

If you want to get good practice, that's what it's about. And the only way to practice is keep putting machines out. And the only way to put machines out is to have enough money to put the machines out.

So we've got to grind down that curve and work our way through that. And the projections we've seen show that if you get around about a gigawatt out there--

so that would be 500 of these machines--

we will be in the prices that are in the same range as those nuclear and getting towards offshore wind.

And what about--

so we've talked about the systems themselves, the machines.

And we talked about the energy in the waves and the tide. What about the sites? How do we select our sites? So if I want to develop a site and I want to put one of these machines in the water, there's probably good and bad sites depending on the marine environment. So what are we looking for?

Fast-moving water. That's really [INAUDIBLE]. Sorry about that, but it's--

because it makes a big difference because the energy goes with the cube of the velocity. So double the speed, eight times the energy.

MAN: [INAUDIBLE]

So it's very much about finding the sweet spots. And there are a number of those around.

But they're well known because they've been on navigation charts produced by the Admiralty since hundreds of years. So we know where the sites are to a large extent. What you then have to do is to work in all the other things that are there, some of the other restrictions.

So who else uses the site? Is there shipping going through there? Is it an area that's heavily fished or is it right outside a port? So there's a bunch of reasons why you start putting lines through some of these sites. That's too shallow or that's too far and stuff like that.

But the estimates are that you could get something in a region of about 10% of the UK's electricity supply out of tides if you use the sites that we know about around the UK at the moment, of which the bulk is the place called the Pentland Firth, which is John o' Groats, just north of that, south of Orkney. That body of water has got a huge amount of energy in it. It's--

I can't remember the numbers now--

5, 6 gigawatts. It's that sort of scale.

So we could be in a position where you can use some really prime sites, and then there are going to be a number of smaller sites around. But some of those are still quite useful. There's one off the southeast coast of the Isle of Wight which is probably around 200 to 300 megawatts, which is a possibility.

MAN: Wow. What do the locals think about this?

That sounds fantastic, and it's also a long way away. So for England and South Scotland, that's so far away, you almost don't even have to think about it.

Said the boy from Birmingham.

Says the boy--

yeah, exactly.

No, I don't mean--

right. Let's just level here. I don't mean like that. But what I'm saying is, do people--

if I lived close to that, I might be a little bit unsure about the impact on the local environment, blah, blah, blah, especially when it's just going to go down south to all the Londoners.

So if we put a gigawatt of tidal or wave up there, what are the locals going to think about it? Is there a NIMBYism--

I wouldn't blame them, by the way, because it's untried and tested to a certain extent.

And they're very valid questions. And that's one of the reasons that--

well, one of the things that EMEC's been doing as a test center is helping people on that journey because the regulators don't know how to regulate this stuff to a large extent. Electricity companies don't know how they're going to integrate this in.

There's a lot of stuff we don't know, and that's some of the stuff we're working our way through, writing the book as we go. But I have to say that what we've had is huge support locally. People have been really keen on it because they're looking at it and going, right, so these machines need maintaining, so my daughter could get a job on that boat.

OK, so we could be working on this. And my son could be working in the shipyard, and she could--

so it's quite real to people. They're going, so how do I get my kids into this? So it's very much a lean forward thing rather than, "don't know about that."

Now, that's not going be the case everywhere.

And it very much depends on how you see the sea.

Certainly in the north of Scotland, the sea has been somewhere that's brought value and wealth, well, for years--

trade with America, fishing, oil industry, the Navy being there. All that sort of stuff has all been ways in which people locally have made a pound off their whole process.

So they can see this is a new thing that go to work.

There is a possibility that some places might regard it as a bit of a threat, but I think it's an uncertainty threat. So "Oh, I can see these things out at sea, I don't like them." Or, Oh, I can see those things out at sea, I really like them."

What's the difference? There's still the same things. It's still the same sea. It's an emotional reaction. And that's the piece we've got to understand and help people deal with.

That's an important point. So you can see them, I assume.

Because you think they're underwater, you won't be able to see them. But actually, they will change the landscape.

So going back to the point I made earlier about the different types, so they're either ones--

the ones we're seeing at the moment are generally the floating ones of a boat or a hull, like a submarine of some type. And so it looks like a low hull in the water. You have to make them visible because you don't want ships banging into them, so you paint them a color you can see. So you can't do them invisibly.

But they're pretty low-impact on the horizon, so you don't really--

I like them. I'm a bit on the biased side, so I'm not the best arbiter. But to be perfectly honest, we don't really feel that that's a snag.

Well, if you got to choose between that or a wind turbine, maybe some people would rather that. I don't know.

NEIL KERMODE: Maybe. I've got a wind turbine in my gardens.

I quite like wind turbines.

I've got I've got 5-kilowatt in my garden, thank you, and I'm very happy with it.

But there are other ones which are put on the water, which are completely underwater. So there are some that are in the Pentland Firth at the moment, and there are some that are being built up in--

or put up in Shetland, built in Leith in Edinburgh, a company called Nova Innovation. And they've put machines in, and they're completely underwater out of sight.

So if that is a thing, then there is a way of dealing that as well. Which is the easiest way of maintaining the machines? At the moment, the surface ones are easier to maintain. But there are different manufacturing and handling strategies which mean that I think we'll end up with a mix.

Because there may be some sites, it's not just visibility. It may be access. You may need to get in and out of here in a boat, so you don't want a load of stuff on the surface. Or it may be an area where nobody really goes, in which case it's less of an issue. You get this long list of sites, and slowly but surely you put lines through some and you'll sieve this out.

I'm going to ask you a bit of a silly question now.

Probably the answer is so obvious and I don't know it that I'm going to look like an idiot. But tidal energy, is it constant or does it vary? So I know the tides come in and they go out, and there's a cadence to that. But is the energy--

it's not like overnight you get--

You tend to get more wind overnight, for example, than in the day. What's that like? Or is it obvious and I shouldn't have even asked the question?

No, no. It's absolutely worth asking because if you're going to--

one day somebody's going to invest in this, you need to know what you're getting back for your money. So the way the tides work is--

because there's a spinning--

we're on a spinning globe, and it's the effect of the sun and the moon and all the rest of it on the skin of water on the outside of planet Earth.

So the effect is that the tides come and go, and they're pretty much a sine wave. So they're a uniform shape.

Because we're generating in them or generating from both directions, you end up with a rectified sine wave. So it's a bump and a bump and a bump. So there are gaps between the bumps, basically.

Now, the gap is a function of the type of site, and the height of the bump is the speed with which the water goes. But generally speaking, you're likely to be able to generate for about 4 and 1/2 to 5 and 1/2 hours per 6. So you've got a gap, half-an-hour-ish, in the dip between the two bumps.

So the question then is, how do you deal with that? And you either--

we've done some work with some batteries and hydrogen production and various things to see if we can fill in the holes between the bumps. You end up with a constant output. But the other big thing is that the power is entirely predictable, and that makes it dispatchable.

So if the National Grid knows that you're going to have a whole lot of tidal energy coming online at exactly 5:47 in the afternoon and it's going to be there for the next 4 and 3/4 hours or whatever it's going to be, you can build that into the process. So it's the dependability we think is really important for system operations.

And so it is variable, but it's not intermittent in the sense it's random.

You know when it's coming.

Absolutely. I could tell you when the tides will be running 1,000 years from today. [INAUDIBLE]

That's pretty cool, isn't it?

So that bit is really important.

And the other thing is this technology can also work in other situations. We talked about it for tide, but you can actually see it in big rivers.

Big rivers are tides that only go one way, basically. So you can see planting this stuff in certain river locations, particular remote locations and areas where diesel is really expensive to fly in. There are other applications this as well.

So we think the market hasn't yet settled on whether it's going to be big grid or a lot of remote community stuff or where that's all going to go. But they all seem open at the moment.

And I want to ask you about the future now. What's next for--

what are you excited about in the next 10 or 20 years? And for folks like us who think this is cool and want to follow it, what should we be thinking about about what's coming next and which companies are doing what? And are there any--

you talked about CFDs. Are there other rounds coming? What does the future look like?

Woo. Right. So we're on single machines at the moment. We're going to go to multiple machines.

That's going to be the big jump that's going to happen. And so the next round of CFD--

and we're on AR5 now and it's going to be our AR6 in a year or so. So there are going to be more rounds there. So that's going be interesting to see how they all fit together.

We're going to see the reliability of these machines go up. So the maintenance interventions will be less frequent. And we're going to see some really good hours on the clock on these machines. We're already into gigawatt hours are being produced from this stuff. So we're going to see more of that, which is really exciting.

But I think the integration with the grid is going to be intriguing because, by definition, these tides tend to happen in remote areas, not in Birmingham. We have tides in Birmingham, we're all in trouble.

We've got locks on canals.

NEIL KERMODE: Yeah, fair enough.

MAN: We could probably get some energy out of that.

Yeah, OK. I'll get back to you on that.

But the big challenge is going to be integration with the grid and working out how that works. And that's really a problem because, generally speaking, the grid doesn't go to where the tides are. So the question is, are we going to build a big enough grid to take the tides, or are we going to do something else with it?

And some of the stuff we've been doing in Orkney I'm really excited about, and that's about taking some tidal energy, spilling the stuff we can't send to the grid, and spilling into electrolysis. And then we've been working on options with what we can do with that hydrogen. So we're working with a combined heat and power unit at the airport to put electricity into the airport to deal with their peak lopping, basically, their demand, and then heat into the airport terminal. One thing's going on.

We've done some stuff--

So it's tidal energy to hydrogen electrolyzer to hydrogen to CHP to heat.

To heat and also electricity. So it's the combined heat and power part. So that's one thing we've done.

We have done some stuff with hydrogen in vehicles. But to be perfectly honest, we don't see that's going to go anywhere because, frankly, batteries have eaten that. So that's going to be direct electrification. And we've got a lot of electric vehicles in Orkney at the moment, so that's going to continue.

But other things with hydrogen. We've put it into people using it for aviation, in fuel cells in aircraft to make the electricity to run electric motors in the aircraft. We supplied some hydrogen to Rolls-Royce to put into gas turbines to see how they get on with that. But the thing that really excites me is the manufacture of synthetic fuels from hydrogen.

And if we take the carbon out of the atmosphere using direct air capture, using the renewable energy we got, we use the electrolysis to make the hydrogen, and combining those two and then making synthetic fuels. It is not an energy efficient thing to do, but it could be an effective thing to do if we need these fuels.

Now, I believe we're going to need them for aviation. And the point is, if you do that, you don't need the grid. So you can build a smaller grid to the coast where the tides are.

[INAUDIBLE]

you have--

you get power electricity from the tide.

You then run the hydrogen--

then you run a process to take carbon out the air and mix it with the hydrogen and create long-chain hydrocarbons. And then you put that in an electric vehicle thing with a wagon on the back and send it to the airport. And then it goes into the planes, and then you fly the planes off that.

NEIL KERMODE: Yes. And you clearly see all the losses all the way through that process.

I'm an engineer.

NEIL KERMODE: You see the numbers drain. But the point is, if we are going to continue to aviate, and I think we will, the only way you can really do that, in my opinion, is doing it with kerosene.

The question is, where to get the kerosene from? Do you get it out of the ground and promise to plant some trees, or do you make the kerosene from the carbon you took out the atmosphere?

We should get--

one of the people we need to get on this podcast is an aviation person to figure out what the future of aviation looks like, because I don't actually know.

I've seen--

I know Michael's Ladder and all that, and there's some cases for ammonia. I know there's lots of research development happening. But I don't understand it fully, so maybe we'll do that.

There is a lot going on. The UK is doing quite a lot. There's a future fuels challenge that's going on at the moment. There's a whole lot of things. There are sustainable aviation fuel policies and stuff like that. And there's a lot going on in that space. And I think it's really worth examining and serving it apart because some of the stuff I worry about sometimes is that we talk about, oh, we'll just plant a load of crops and we'll sequester the carbon that way.

But yeah, we got 9 billion people to feed as well. So I think we need that sensible discussion to actually--

and tease it out and go, yeah, that doesn't work, though, does it? Look, here's the maths. There you go. Show me how that works.

I genuinely believe--

I'm a civil engineer by training, so concrete is my thing generally, so not aviation.

But just looking at the maths, it looks to me as though we're really going to struggle to do the long-distance stuff unless we're doing it with kerosenes. And that's what we've chosen. And frankly, there's nothing more energy-dense than kerosene. That's where we're going to have to go.

The question is whether we are going to be able to--

we're willing to pay enough to do it the way I'm suggesting, or whether we're going to do it on the fossil fuel route and promise to sort the problem out later.

We'll find out. We'll find out. Now I want to ask you--

I can't believe we haven't done any puns in this discussion. There's so many wave puns and tide puns and turn of phrase we could have used. But nevermind. Maybe--

Izzy, can we edit some in later?

Two last questions. Number one, is there anything you'd like to plug? Anything you're working on or that you think our listeners should know about? This is your chance.

Thank you. We think we can take the learning we've had from running a test center, which allow people to get their machines up and try them out in full-scale conditions, we think that's going to do that for floating offshore wind because there's a lot to work out in floating offshore wind. A lot.

We know the basic technology, but we're going for a much bigger turbines in really aggressive conditions. I hope nobody thinks they know it all at the moment because if they do, I would worry. So we think there is scope to do exactly that for a site where you can put in a number of 20-megawatt turbines and run them and learn stuff.

And we think it's going be really important because from an investment point of view, somebody's going to have to do due diligence on these proposals at some stage. And if you've not put one of these machines up in the waters that you're going to be going into later, that's going to be a long and detailed argument, and we think--

You guys have got some scars already. So we need to get the floating wind people and the marine people together for one big party and share some learnings.

That'll be a good idea.

Plenty of--

no sharp objects in the room, but sure we'll make it work.

But it does feel as though that's a thing there. And that's something we're looking to try and do at the moment. And so while I'm interested in is, if people have got floating wind concepts and they want to say we need to try this out, then come and talk to us because we really believe there is a safe space where people need to be able to be honest about the challenges that they're--

NEIL KERMODE: --worrying about.

And they can fly up to visit beautiful Orkney as well and see the 22,000 people there.

NEIL KERMODE: Doing our thing.

And the last question is a bit more tricky.

So what's your contrarian view? You probably got a few, but what's the thing that you believe that not everybody else does? And how does that fit within the energy transition and the big picture?

We've built an awful lot of crap housing for a lot of years, and we've got to stop doing that. We are wasting so much energy on our housing. And the view, once again coming from a construction background, is I think we've got to get to a point where we go, you know what, some of this stuff we just have to take it down and do it properly.

I know we did it back then in the '70s and '80s and thought it was great, but you know what? Sorry. We cleared slums in the past for health reasons. Are we going to have to clear the equivalent of slums for energy reasons?

And I suspect we can turn that from a negative--

"we're going to trash an area--

to "we could do this better."

We can live in better houses and live more comfortable lives and spend less money on doing it, which works for me. But I suspect there's a need for us to do that. And we overfocus on the retrofit stuff, and sometimes we need to draw a line and go, yeah--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Sometimes you go really? Sorry. And I think the point there is if you show people--

get people to live in a better environment for a bit and then ask them to go back to it, I bet they won't. So I think we need to demonstrate how a better way of living could be achieved, and I'm sure that will then help that go.

Incredible. We haven't had that before. So better housing which is better for the environment and also better for people to live in.

Yes. It's a good starting point.

MAN: Good starting point, right. You should put on your election manifesto. [CHUCKLES]

I want to say a big thank you, Neil, for coming on. And for everyone who's listening, if you want to get in touch with Neil and the team, how do we do that?

Easy website. All the w's dot EMEC, so E-M-E-C, dot org dot UK.

Awesome. And it's been a delight talking to you. There's so much stuff to go through here in tidal and wave and how this all fits together.

For anyone who's listening, do let us know what you think of in the comments. Of course hit Subscribe. It means a lot to us. And we'll see you next week. Thank you.

Thank you.

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