MEP calls for more EU financial backing for wave and tidal energy

By Colin Donald

BRUSSELS must t hrow more support behind the nascent marine energy sector, the SNP’s leading European parliamentarian has urged. Alyn Smith MEP has called on the European Commission to “get behind ocean energy as a technology with a glittering contribution to make”.

“The commission still sees [wave and tidal] energy as an experimental [long term] venture which, while useful, is not going to give it the priority it needs when we are well beyond the people-in-white-coats stage and require heavy- duty commercialisation going forward, not intermittent research money.”

Smyth, a member of the European Parliament’s energy committee, said the imminent agreement of the EU’s €960 billion multi-annual financial framework will provide the certainty to allow the commission to back the sector.

He said: “The technology is essentially good to go, and the biggest barriers are funding, long-term political and market certainty, in terms of how the tariffs will work and whether they might change, and grid connection charges.

“The EU could plug the funding gap with a few demonstrator projects to give the market certainty that it works and is backed. The Green Investment Bank should be doing likewise.”

Johanna Yates of the Scottish European Green Energy Centre in Aberdeen