Anthony Doesburg: Sea-power promoters swimming against the tide

Another year, another marine energy conference - but still no electricity being generated by the waves or the tides in New Zealand.

By rights, Aotearoa Wave and Tidal Energy Association (Awatea) founder John Huckerby should be getting despondent about the prospects for marine energy. But he says he's not.

Awatea has been in existence for five years and will stage its fourth annual conference in Wellington on Monday, with one of the sessions titled "avoiding the valley of death".

That's meant to describe the difficulty of making the transition from the prototype phase of a project to full production, says Huckerby, for which funding can be hard to come by.

But more fundamentally, he concedes that from the outside the very idea of extracting energy from the sea could be seen to be in danger of plunging into an abyss.

"The initial promise of ocean energy around the turn of the millennium was that by 2004-2005 we would have working power stations," Huckerby says. New Zealand certainly doesn't, although there are a handful of projects on the drawing board.

"I don't feel particularly demoralised," he says, despite the grindingly slow progress on bringing projects to fruition.

The country's biggest plan to date, Crest Energy's scheme for putting 200 tidal flow turbines in the Kaipara Harbour to power 250,000 homes, still doesn't have resource consent 3 years after an application was lodged.

Huckerby takes heart from overseas developments, which will be reported on at the conference by speakers from more than a dozen countries where marine energy development is taking place.

Britain is the most active, with the Government last month giving the go-ahead for use of 10 sites in Scotland's Pentland Firth for tidal and wave projects that will produce 1.2GW of power by 2020.

The only New Zealand effort to have resource consent is Neptune Power's plan for a trial tidal turbine off the coast of Wellington. But Neptune will be conspicuously absent from the Awatea conference.

Chris Bathurst, co-founder of the Christchurch-based company, says it can't afford to attend, let alone start installing the 1MW turbine it has consent for, which the company hopes will prove the feasibility of generating up to 12GW in Cook Strait.

The conference cost is just a few hundred dollars, but placing the turbine at its intended depth of 80m would take millions, Bathurst estimates.

"The whole project for the single turbine would be about $20 million."

Although that's double the figure he put on it when Wellington Regional Council approved the project in 2008, once it is over the initial investment hump Bathurst says Neptune's technology is cheaper than either wind or hydro generation.

"I still think we're the best option but it's damned hard getting support in the present market."

Bathurst is pinning his hopes on a visit to the company by American Robert West, of the Ocean Energy Institute. The institute was set up in 2007 to invest in US offshore renewable energy: "I'd love to see him pull out his chequebook."

However Crest Energy looks a good bet for winning the race to get a turbine into the water. The company was first to lodge a resource consent application, in July 2006, for a 200-turbine project in the Kaipara.

In December the Environment Court asked Crest to provide more details about environmental monitoring and the likely effect of the project on endangered Maui's dolphins and the harbour's snapper fishery, before it could grant consent.

Crest director Anthony Hopkins, who will talk about the environmental issues the project has had to contend with at next week's conference, remains upbeat.

Having Todd Energy buy 30 per cent of the company in December no doubt helps.

For now it's a matter of working through the judicial process, says Hopkins, who is undeterred by a Dargaville Times story about large amounts of black ironsand entering the harbour, with potential to disrupt Crest's turbines.

"There's no doubt at all that the whole harbour moves around a bit ... and if there's a bit more black sand than normal, so be it." He refutes any suggestion the sand might interfere with electricity generation.

Conference attendees will also hear about three other local projects: from Wave Energy Technology, a joint venture between Huckerby's company Power Projects and Industrial Research; Energy Pacifica; and Chatham Islands Marine Energy.

Marine Energy's doubters should listen to Mike Underhill, head of the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority, who will give the conference-opening address.

"We have 19,000km of coastline in New Zealand, we're sitting in the Roaring 40s with not too many countries blocking the wave forms - we have some of the best wave potential in the world.

"Patience is the key word here."

Blue Power

Britain last month announced plans for 10 tidal and wave-power projects around the Orkney Islands and off Scotland's northern coast. The projects, scheduled for completion by 2020, are expected to generate up to 1.2GW - enough for 750,000 homes. Projected cost is £4 billion ($8.6 billion), plus another £1 billion for support facilities.

Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland technology journalist