redp grants about to be announced, page-19

Tuckey a "cute" gnome? I have never ever heard him being described as cute! Maybe worst nightmare, but not cute, LOL!

Its interesting the difference between wave and tidal power. There was a session at the conference during the week about this. Just to recap from memory - tidal power is of course gravitational in nature (the effect of the moon) whereas wave power is due to winds which are due to heating of the oceans (and land?) which is due to the sun.

The biggest thing I learnt was the difficult logistics involved. With tidal power you often only have a short window of an hour or so to do deployments, presumably as the tide is switching direction. Logistics are an issue for wave power as well because you want to deploy where the wave resource is strongest, naturally.

Australia has very little in the way of tidal resource and as you say most of it is in the north west. I really don't think it is going to become a big deal here apart from maybe a few niche projects.

As far as tidal devices go there was a presenter from Lunar Energy and they have a Rotech turbine which produces 1 MW. A prototype has been assembled but its not in the water yet. Its going to be deployed at EMEC (European Marine Energy Centre, Orkney Islands), which I found a little strange, but it looks like the EMEC test site has both wave and tidal resources, in slightly different locations. See map at http://www.emec.org.uk

Here's their latest news (note the first item - logistics issues!):

"09-Oct-2009 THE NEWS THIS WEEK

•Planned work at our wave site was put on hold this week due to the lack of weather windows, with vessels standing by in Stromness.

•Scottish Natural Heritage held a team meeting at EMEC this week for staff from all over Scotland involved in renewables. Jenny Norris, EMEC’s Research and Consents Manager, and Research Assistant Matthew Finn took the group to visit Billia Croo and see the site activity.

•A student group from the Politecnico di Torino in Italy visited EMEC this week, and Eileen Linklater, Client and Marketing Manager gave a talk to a group of Art students from Edinburgh and Denmark in Orkney on a field trip.

•Over the last few days a French camera crew have also been in and around Stromness, filming for a Documentary on marine renewables in Scotland for the long-running France 3 series “Thallassa” (Greek for ‘sea’). Various members of staff at EMEC have been shadowed and interviewed, and the crew visited the wave site with Aquamarine, and the tidal site with OpenHydro."

Thalassa is of course the doco series shown regularly on SBS so maybe we will see that episode soon.

There is a good list of wave developers here:

http://www.emec.org.uk/wave_energy_developers.asp

...but no mention of Carnegie or BioPower for that matter. Seems a bit strange.