GreenBang reports that Siemens its expanding its presence in the ocean energy market - In marine current energy, Siemens wants to be 800-lb gorilla.

There’s a lot of energy in the world’s oceans, and Siemens wants to play a big part in developing that power for our use.

The Germany-based technology giant announced today that it’s taken on a larger stake in a British marine-energy company, Marine Current Turbines Ltd. Siemens first dipped its toe into the marine current tidal energy sector in February of 2010, when it acquired a minor stake in the company. It now has a 45-percent stake.

“With this increase in its stake, Siemens is strengthening its activities in ocean power generation,” said Michael Axmann, CFO of the newly founded Solar & Hydro Division within Siemens’ Energy Sector. “We will actively shape the commercialization process of innovative marine current power plants.” ...

Some estimates say tidal power plants deployed around the world could generate up to 800 terawatt-hours of clean energy each year. That’s enough to meet 3 to 4 percent of the world’s energy needs, and 25 percent more than all the energy used in Germany.

Marine Current Turbines plans to present two project investment prospectuses to the market in November: one for the 8 megawatt (MW) Kyle Rhea project in Scotland and another for the 10MW Anglesey Skerries project in Wales. The company also has lease approval to deploy a 100MW tidal farm off Brough Ness on the southernmost tip of the Orkney Islands in Scotland. ...

The company has already demonstrated its first commercial-scale project, SeaGen in Northern Ireland. Since November 2008, two turbines with a combined capacity of 1.2MW have been plugged into the grid and providing enough power to supply about 1,500 homes. With more than 2.7 gigawatt-hours of electricity generated so far, SeaGen is so far the top electricity producer in the marine current power sector.

The name “Kawasaki” may be most readily associated with motors of the two-wheeled, gasoline-powered variety; but the Japanese multinational company has recently announced that it will soon be getting into the tidal power generation business. Kawasaki Heavy Industries (KHI) has announced that it will work with Okinawa Electric Power and Okinawa New Energy Development to prepare a new tidal power generator technology for testing off the coast of Okinawa, Japan. Then, KHI will test the technology at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Orkney, Scotland.

The EMEC is the first center of its kind to offer developers an opportunity to test full-scale, grid-connected prototypes under high velocity wave and tidal conditions. High velocity currents at the tidal test site at the Fall of Warness, where the KHI technology will be tested, reach almost 4m/sec (7.8 knots). The facility offers seven test beds at depths ranging from 12 to 50 meters, in an area of over three square miles.

The BBC has an article on another tidal power project planned for the UK - Anglesey £70m tidal power project plans go forward.

Plans for a power-generating tidal farm off the north Wales coast have been submitted.

The £70m project for the underwater turbines, off the north west coast of Anglesey, was first announced three years ago.

Marine Current Turbines (MCT) and RWE npower Renewables are behind the scheme off Holyhead, between the Skerries and Carmel Head.

If given the go ahead by ministers, it could be operational by 2015.

With technology similar to on-shore windmills, developers say the turbines should create enough electricity to power 10,000 homes on Anglesey.

The seven twin rotor turbines would be arranged across an area of 0.56km².

The plans, together with an environmental impact assessment, have gone to the Welsh Assembly Government.

Martin Wright, CEO and founder of MCT said: "Tidal power is a predictable and reliable source of renewable energy and our technology can play an important part in helping Wales realise its renewable energy targets as set out in the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) energy policy statement.

"It aims to capture 10% of the tidal stream and wave energy off the Welsh coast by 2025, making Wales a UK low carbon economic area for tidal energy."

The WSJ has a look at tidal power news in the UK - Tidal-Power Project Ebbs in U.K..

Tidal power has been hailed by some as the wave of the future. But in the United Kingdom, the shifting tides of public policy threaten to leave it high and dry.

Puns aside, last month, the U.K. government withdrew its support for one of the world's most ambitious renewable-energy projects—a $24 billion tidal barrage across the Severn Estuary that potentially could have generated as much as 5% of the U.K.'s electricity. The British government said a two-year feasibility study determined that the project would actually cost about $54 billion, and it couldn't justify public funding of such a high-cost, high-risk project.

But there was another factor weighing against the project: its environmental impact. Though the barrage—which would stretch across the estuary and function a bit like a hydroelectric dam—was pitched as a clean technology, green groups argued it would destroy marsh and mud flats used by thousands of birds, and block the migration routes of fish. The government agreed.

"Harnessing the huge tidal power of the Severn has to be right, but it cannot be right to trash the natural environment in the process," says Martin Harper of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a U.K. charity.

While many people believe the government's decision is a death blow to the project, the private consortium behind the barrage, Corlan Hafren Ltd., has vowed to proceed without government support.

The barrage isn't the first renewable-energy project to run afoul of environmentalists. That may be why interest is growing in the U.K. in another type of marine power that draws fewer objections from green groups: tidal-stream energy. Experts have said 15% to 20% of current U.K. electricity demand could ultimately be met by wave and tidal-stream energy, where turbines are placed in fast-flowing currents or tidal steams and powered by the moving water in much the same way moving air powers windmills.

SeaGen, the world's first commercial tidal-stream generator, operates in Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland, an inlet chosen for its extremely fast tidal current. Marine Current Turbines Ltd., the company behind SeaGen, also is working with a unit of the German utility RWE AG on a tidal-energy farm in North Wales. By the end of the decade, they plan to have major tidal farms off Scotland's Pentland Firth—an area often described as the Saudi Arabia of marine energy—and off the northern Irish coast.

Cleantechnica has a report on a Marine Current Turbines tidal power project in the Bay of Fundy - Giant Tidal Power Turbines Coming to a Canada Near You

One of the world’s leading developers of tidal power will partner with a Canadian utility to develop tidal power technology and associated facilities in Canada’s Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia.

Working in partnership with the Canadian company Minas Basin Pulp and Power, UK tidal power developers, Marine Current Turbines will demonstrate and deploy a 1.5MW tidal generator that will be connected to the Nova Scotia power grid.

Scott Travers, of Minas Basin Pulp and Power praised the move as an economic boon. “There is a potential new industry here employing hundreds of people in operations and manufacturing and deployment of tidal power technology, here and globally,” said Travers in a statement.

The SeaGen turbines to be installed use similar principles found in wind generator technology. The tidal turbines generate power from sea currents using a pair of axial flow turbines that drive generators through gearboxes. However, the high density of seawater compared to wind allows a much smaller system. The bay of fundycapture of kinetic energy from a water current, much like with wind energy or solar energy, depends on how many square meters of flow cross-section can be addressed by the system.

CleanTechnica has a post on the Seagen tidal power system in Northern Ireland generating at full capacity for the first time - SeaGen Shatters Tidal Power Generation Record.

Since its inception, we have been keeping a close eye on Marine Current Turbine’s SeaGen project in the UK, the world’s first commercial scale tidal stream turbine. Well, today there is more big news to report from the strong tidal flows of Strangford Lough as SeaGen has generated at its maximum capacity of 1.2MW for the first time. Thus far, this is the highest power produced by a tidal stream system anywhere in the world and exceeds the previous highest output of 300kW produced in 2004 by the company’s earlier SeaFlow system, off the north Devon coast. ...

According to company officials, now that SeaGen has reached full power it will move towards full-operating mode for periods of up to 22 hours a day, with regular inspections and performance testing undertaken as part of the project’s development program. ...

Drawing on its experience at Strangford Lough, MCT’s next project is a joint initiative with npower renewables to build a 10.5MW project using seven SeaGen turbines off the coast of north Wales. That project is scheduled to come online in late 2011/early 2012.

With 745 miles of coastline, California could potentially meet more than a fifth of its electricity needs from renewable ocean wave power, according to the California Energy Commission.

But while the state does little to develop that immense resource, Scotland took a great leap forward this month with the announcement of the Saltire Prize--worth 10 million British pounds--for the best innovation in marine energy technology. Already, the prize has reportedly attracted 33 entries from five continents.

The huge award will go to the team that best delivers, off the Scottish coast, "a commercially viable wave or tidal energy technology that achieves a minimum electrical output of 100 GWh over a continuous two-year period using only the power of the sea."

Scotland isn't placing all its wave power bets on the prize, however. A Scottish firm, Pelamis Wave Power Ltd., installed the world's first commercial ocean electricity generators off the coast of Portugal in September and plans similar installations in Scotland and England. It is already considered a world leader in the technology.

Also in September, Scottish Power said it was considering three coastal sites to install the world's biggest tidal power project by 2011.

Scotland first minister Alex Salmond said he hoped the latter announcement was a harbinger of things to come. "Scotland has a marine energy resource which is unrivalled in Europe," he said. "We have an estimated 25 per cent of Europe's tidal resource and 10 per cent of its wave potential."

Plans to generate tidal power in Scotland continue to gather strength, with the BBC reporting that Marine Current Turbines are looking at building a 300 MW plant in Pentland Firth - Turbines plan for Pentland Firth

An energy company has announced it wants to deploy underwater electricity turbines in the Pentland Firth. Marine Current Turbines confirmed it intends to apply for a lease from the Crown Estate allowing it to install 300 megawatts (MW) of capacity by 2020. The firm has already deployed a similar tidal energy system in Northern Ireland's Strangford Lough.

The Crown Estate announced in September it was to lease the bed of the firth to developers who want to generate power. The firth, between the Scottish mainland and Orkney, contains six of the top 10 sites in the UK for tidal energy.

It is hoped its power could be harnessed to generate 700MW of electricity by 2020 - enough for about 400,000 homes. Marine Current Turbines said it believed its SeaGen technology could generate up to 300MW or more by 2020 if the local grid could take it.

The Independent has a look at the latest news in British ocean power generation. Meanwhile Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy are wasting time and money talking about building expensive and unpopular nuclear power plants (see here for more on ocean energy).

Britain is set this week to enter a new age, generating energy directly from the seas that surge around its shores. On Saturday a strange, 122ft- long contraption – looking like an upside-down windmill – will set off from the Belfast dock that built the Titanic to produce the first electricity ever brought ashore from British tides.

The device – the first of its kind anywhere in the world – is expected to start a revolution which could lead to our island nation getting a fifth of its power from its surrounding waters, and to the far north of Scotland becoming "the Saudi Arabia of marine energy".

Remarkably, the pioneering device, which will start producing power from predictable and clean tidal energy, is the fruit of the vision and persistence of a single campaigning engineer, and has been developed by a small West Country firm. Though it has recently had some Government support, ministers have traditionally preferred to pour resources into much bigger projects, such as nuclear power stations. Indeed, the installation of the new device – near the mouth of Northern Ireland's Strangford Lough – is scheduled to take place only days after the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, are expected to sign a deal to jointly construct a new generation of reactors and to sell the technology around the world.

Yet the inauguration of a tidal turbine, dubbed SeaGen – which will generate enough electricity to power 1,140 homes by being placed directly in the tide race that rushes in and out of the lough – may unexpectedly prove to be the more significant event. While the much-vaunted Severn Barrage has only just begun to undergo a two-year feasibility study, experts are hailing the new turbine as the start of a giant leap in exploiting marine energy, where Britain, for once, is now leading the world.

Later this year, in another global first, a wave energy power station developed by an Edinburgh firm is to be installed in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Portugal. Next year, an even bigger one, off Cornwall, is expected to start feeding electricity into the national grid, and yet another is planned for the Orkneys. And Marine Current Turbines, the firm behind SeaGen, has joined with the utility company npower to develop a tidal power station off Anglesey.

Britain has the best tide and wave energy resources in the world – the official Carbon Trust estimates that they could together provide a fifth of our electricity. Yet, until recently, successive governments have set their face against developing them.

In the 1980s the then Department of Energy killed off promising proposals for exploiting the waves amid evidence that it did so because they threatened its (never realised) plans to expand nuclear power. In 1992 an official report concluded that it "did not see any justification for significant public expenditure" on offshore energy, and as recently as 2003 a Government White Paper ruled out the development of a Severn Barrage.

The tide only turned decisively about a year ago when, as The Independent on Sunday exclusively reported, ministers began backing plans for the £14bn, 10-mile barrage. Gordon Brown officially announced a feasibility study at the last Labour Party conference, and this got under way in January.

Launching the study, which will continue until 2010, the Secretary of State for Business, John Hutton, described the barrage's potential as "breathtaking". But though it could alone provide 5 per cent of the country's electricity from a completely dependable, renewable resource it could not be in operation until at least 2020.

And the Government's official environmental advisers – the Environment Agency, Natural England and the Countryside Council for Wales – have warned that the barrage would "cause irreversible impacts" to the estuary's "internationally important habitats" for wildlife and to its "unique ecology".

The scheme in Northern Ireland avoids these drawbacks by using a radically different technology. While the barrage impounds the rising tide behind a dam – letting it out, as it falls, through some 200 turbines in the structure – SeaGen sits in the tidal currents like an inverted windmill, capturing some of the energy by letting the water, rather than air, turn its sails as it flows.

While the barrage is a mammoth and expensive structure, which takes many years to build and then cannot be moved, the turbines can be constructed and sited relatively quickly, cheaply and flexibly. And while damming the Severn estuary inevitably fundamentally alters its ecology, SeaGen is expected to have far less impact on wildlife and the environment. But its technology's potential is no smaller. A report by the Sustainable Development Commission last year estimated that exploiting Britain's tidal currents could generate at least 5 per cent of the nation's electricity. Other authorities put it even higher.

Professor Stephen Salter of Edinburgh University, one of Britain's leading marine energy experts, estimates that the Pentland Firth alone could generate up to a quarter of Britain's electricity – more than is now being provided by all the country's nuclear power stations – making the channel between Orkney and the north Scottish mainland "the Saudi Arabia of marine energy."

Martin Wright, managing director of Marine Current Turbines, calls the firth, the "Mount Everest" of the industry, and describes its tidal currents as "the equivalent of an underwater hurricane". Every second, about 2.5 million cubic metres of water – enough to fill 1,000 Olympic swimming pools – passes at a speed of up to 12 knots across a line traced across the Firth.

This is just the biggest of a host of potential sites, usually where the tides are speeded up by being squeezed through narrow channels, forming one of the most intense resources provided by any form of renewable energy. In all, the Government estimates, Britain has about half of all Europe's such "tidal stream" potential and between 10 and 15 per cent of what has been identified worldwide, making it uniquely blessed.

Some 24 technologies, at various stages of research and development, have been put forward for exploiting tidal currents, but SeaGen – invented by Peter Fraenkel – a renewable energy pioneer who is now Marine Current Turbines' technical director (see right) is well in the lead.

In 2003 a smaller prototype, called Seaflow, was installed off Lynmouth in Devon becoming the first renewable energy device, powered by the sea, to be installed in the open ocean anywhere in the world. It operated through three winters, with regular force 8 gales, without any important technical failures – with an overall performance that exceeded expectations. Dr Fraenkel says it "proved the feasibility" of the technology.

He adds that SeaGen – four times as powerful, with a capacity of 1.2 megawatts – "is the world's first commercial scale system for generating electricity from marine currents" – and is "needed to prove economic and commercial feasibility".

Originally designed to be installed in 2006, it was held up by a series of events including the commercial takeover of the company due to install it, and an accident to a vessel due to carry it.

A fear that sea levels will rise far faster than predicted this century has led to a revision of the plan to protect London from a devastating flood caused by the sort of storm surge in the North Sea that resulted in the closure of the Thames Barrier yesterday.

It was the 108th time that the barrier had to be closed since it became operational in 1982 but scientists are concerned that rapidly rising sea levels could significantly shorten the expected lifespan of one of the world's biggest anti-flood structures.

When the Thames Barrier was being designed in the 1970s, global average sea levels were rising at about 1.8 millimetres a year and global warming was not seen as a threat, but in the past 15 years the rate has nearly doubled to about 3.1mm a year and many scientists expect it to accelerate still further.

Sea levels are rising even faster in south-east England because of local effects, such as land sinking, but officials for the Environment Agency said that the barrier is designed to cope with an 8mm-per-year rate of sea level increase yet still meet its design specifications – such as coping with a one-in-a-thousand-year storm surge by 2030. ...

The Thames Barrier protects about £80bn worth of buildings and capital infrastructure in London. Some 1.25 million people live or work in the at-risk area.