Scotland's Next Wave: Marine Power

From his office in a converted Victorian schoolhouse, Neil Kermode can see little more than centuries-old stone buildings and narrow streets better suited to horse carts than Land Rovers. Yet Kermode, head of the European Marine Energy Centre in Scotland’s Orkney Islands, will tell you he can also see the future. Orkney, a collection of green, hilly islands where the North Sea collides with the Atlantic Ocean, has become a testing ground for wave and tidal power, technologies that will be instrumental in helping Scotland reach its goal of getting all its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. “The bit of alchemy of turning seawater into electricity has been done,” Kermode says as he gazes out at the busy harbor in Stromness, a 90-minute ferry ride from the Scottish mainland. “Now what we’ve got to do is to industrialize it and do it reliably.”

Kermode’s group, set up in 2003 with public money, is helping companies across Europe tap Scotland’s formidable tidal and wave power resources. Although marine energy is at least four years away from making power on a commercial scale, the government is hoping the industry will produce 1,600 megawatts by 2020, or about 46 percent of today’s output from Scotland’s two coal-fired plants.