Inside Business  

The ABC's "Inside Business" recently had a segment on concerns bad policy is threatening the renewable energy sector - something I've moaned about previously.

Video - RealPlayer, Windows Media.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: The ocean generates enough energy to satisfy the world's power needs 5,000 times over. What if we could harness just a fraction of this clean energy? An Australian company believes it can.

DR TOM DENNIS: In 50 years we would be hoping to be providing some appreciable percentage of the world's power from devices like this.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: This is a prototype of the energetic wave energy system. Rising and falling waves are funnelled into a collector which causes air to rush through the chamber which in turn drives a turbine. It's expected the generator will produce about 2 megawatts of power, enough to power 2,000 homes.

DR TOM DENNIS: This is our plant, which will be the first demonstration of this technology expected to be the first to make wave energy commercially viable and hopefully we'll see a proliferation of the technology very soon after we put this one in the water.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: Energetic estimates export potential of up to $5 billion a year in sales. Yet, it struggled to find local financial support. It initially received support from the Australian Greenhouse Office and the Centre for Energy and Greenhouse Technologies, a venture capital fund using Victorian State Government and private money, total funding of little more than $1 million. But Energetic has had no problems attracting off shore investment. European venture capital funds have invested while the small Australian company is developing the technology in North America with more than $2 million in US and Canadian government funding.

It's a familiar story in the often heartbreaking field of renewable energy commercialisation.

STEVE HASTINGS: We sought help over that period of time from the Victorian Government in the early days, from the Oz Industry Grant Scheme and in both cases we were dismissed as being of no national interest.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: Steve Hastings has had to use his own funds to develop a marine energy system. The title to lay power generation process captures energy from water as it moves in and out of a bay or past a peninsula. While rejected in Australia, British investors have embraced the technology.

STEVE HASTINGS: In the UK where we spent a lot of our time, marine energy has received a very high degree of government funding, it's a 42 million pound marine devise development fund which has just been announced earlier this year and we will be seeking access to that because in simple terms, there is no large scale renewable energy funding mechanism in Australia.