| Some experts believe that if we knew how to control the power of the sea, we could generate enough electricity for the whole world. But, in this talk, I'm going to focus on the UK, and our capacity for generating electricity from wave and tidal energy. I'm going to look at how many megawatts we generated before 2008 and how many we expect to produce in 2014. So, if you'd like to look at the chart, you’ll see that before 2008, our capacity was only one megawatt. But in 2008 when oil prices rose, there was an increased interest in marine power and our capacity grew quite dramatically to four megawatts. Ahhh...... now, you might have expected this figure to rise consistently over the years, but, in fact it dropped again in 2009 to only two megawatts. This was because oil prices fell again, so there was less interest in developing alternative power sources. But, nowadays the cost of oil production is going up again, and there’s been a renewed interest in marine power. As a consequence, capacity has increased steadily since 2009, reaching 18 megawatts in 2012. This trend is expected to continue in the near future, reaching a total capacity of 50 megawatts in 2013 and 50 megawatts in 2014. |
