Marine Energy Wales

Home » What our industry needs to succeed

At Marine Energy Wales, we focus on staying in touch with industry so that we can understand and work to overcome challenges on behalf of our valued members. Through our regular engagement, we have compiled what we understand to be the critical needs of the industry, and key enablers for growth going forward. 

Tidal Stream  

The tidal stream sector is at a key inflection point as it transitions from individual device manufacture and testing into commercialisation. Enablers to support this scaling up are:  

Visibility and surety of future project pipelines to incentivise investment into the sector and provide the necessary capital to expand manufacturing.  

A guaranteed and continued route to market through the annual CfD auction round with continuation of an appropriately sized tidal stream ringfence, and future seabed leasing opportunities for new tidal stream sites.  

Bespoke financial products for this emerging sector which dominated by SMEs with small balance sheets. There is a need for new financial products and services that can support them, with enough up-front capital to reach electricity and revenue generation.  

Collaboration on supply chain development to ensure capacity for the several turbine developers, and to ensure economic opportunities are anchored in Wales.  

A joint effort is required between industry and consent bodies to remove and reduce environmental risks using all relevant UK wide evidence. Standard methods for monitoring and deterrence techniques must be developed to guide best practices.   

Floating offshore wind   

The floating offshore wind sector remains poised for largescale commercial rollout in the Celtic Sea in the 2030s but needs significant backing in the near-term to ensure successful developments and to guarantee socio-economic benefits come to the people of Wales:  

Significant infrastructure improvements for ports and grid. Both need large-scale investment and redevelopment to be able to support multi-gigawatts of deployment.   

Coordinated pipeline for seabed leasing and CfD auctions to provide certainty and confidence for ports and developers and support a steady deployment of projects.    

Successful test & demonstration projects which trigger early development of supply chain and ports, and an opportunity to trial technologies and methodologies.   

Well-developed models for community benefits with the right incentives in place to promote their adoptions and generate meaningful social value to the people of Wales.  

Skills Development and training must be ramped up to meet the growing demand for people and key skills within the sector.  

Wave   

Wave energy still requires much support to reach a point of commercial maturity: 

Demonstration funding is required to build confidence in the technology and enable long-term at sea deployments which can demonstrate its survivability and viability.  

Research & Development funding would support the advancement of innovative technologies, particularly important given wave energy is at a significantly lower rate of technological maturity than tidal stream.  

An active sector in Wales which would incentivise wave energy developers to use Wales’s national testing facility META and help anchor future development in Wales.  Co-location opportunities written in to both seabed leasing and CfD auctions to enable the significant opportunities and benefits associated with co-locating wind and wave farms.  

Tidal Range  

With minimal traction in project development to date, the tidal range sector needs:  

A clear pathway to project development and a political will within the UK Government to give projects the green light and a suitable finance mechanism which supports the development of lagoons/barrages as long-term multi-generational assets. Such support would increase investor confidence in the sector and allow incentivise proposals being put forward.  

Demonstration of new technologies and support for small pilot projects testing innovative new technologies to capture a share of the turbine market.  

Coordinated spatial planning is needed to identify the most suitable sites for lagoon or barrage projects, supporting a project-agnostic approach to industry development.