What are the main barriers for successful implementation of tidal energy solutions?
It’s the same old story really-simpler licensing laws, access to the grid and increased capital investment. Due to the tidal industry being in its infancy then it’s hard to predict how it will perform over the course of the year. Utility companies need to offer a flexible integration model to make it easier for developers to get connected – this is where ROC (renewable obligation certificates) are seen as being less attractive when compared to their European counterpart FITs (feed in tariffs). The availability and cost of suitable vessels to actually deploy a turbine is also a problem due to the incredibly busy oil industry which has the money and the certainty of work to keep vessels booked up for months if not years in advance. Europe appears to have a more suck it and see approach which has allowed smaller prototypes to be tested. One of the things which became clear at the tidal summit is that developers in the UK are having to scale up a prototype to a full commercial scale in one
