Carbon Trust continues marine energy investment drive with yield optimisation partnership

The Carbon Trust is working with consultancy firm Frazer-Nash to gain a better understanding of energy yield and uncertainty assessment across the wave and tidal energy industries in a bid to drive investment.


With commercial-scale marine energy farms close to deployment in UK waters, Frazer-Nash will work with the Carbon Trust on its Marine Farm Accelerator programme – an Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult scheme which seeks to accelerate deployment of marine farm projects.

Frazer-Nash’s group leader Neil Adams said: “Frazer-Nash has been appointed to give a clear overview of the approaches used for energy yield and uncertainty assessment across the wave and tidal energy industry and the relative pros and cons of each. This will be a major step forward in standardising the approaches taken across the industry.

“It builds on our previous experience of performing energy yield predictions and uncertainty estimation for marine schemes. Our work will help developers and investors involved in accelerating the commercialisation of marine energy.” 

More investment

The development of best practice guidance for wave and tidal energy yield uncertainty assessments will deliver various benefits: –

– For the Marine Farm Accelerator programme’s key stakeholders: It will help identify aspects of the process with the greatest uncertainties and enable them to direct their efforts where they can provide maximum benefit for the industry. 
– For investors: It will enable them to compare potential projects on a like-for-like basis, helping them to decide where and how to invest their capital. 
– For project developers: It will increase their understanding of the risks associated with projects and present them in a transparent way, which in turn will help attract investment. 

The Carbon Trust’s Marine Farm Accelerator programme involves a Steering Group that includes leading marine farm project developers selects and prioritises the technology areas that the programme targets.

Accelerating deployment

The Trust’s technology acceleration manager James Sinfield told edie: “Collaboration is key to the success of the marine energy industry and the Marine Farm Accelerator is a programme that is encouraging project developers, device developers and the supply chain to work together to develop and adopt innovations to reduce the cost of energy.

“One of the many challenges facing marine energy is how to optimise and understand the yield of devices and arrays; this project which is being undertaken by Frazer-Nash to understand the uncertainty in yield of wave and tidal arrays is an important step towards making marine energy more attractive to private investment and accelerating deployment.”

Marine energy holds huge potential to provide the UK with a clean and secure source of electricity. Harnessing this energy will also create an industry which could deliver significant investment and jobs throughout the country.

ORE Catapult was established by the UK Government in 2013 and is one of seven such Catapults set up by Innovate UK in high-growth industries. It is the UK’s flagship technology innovation and research centre for offshore wind, wave and tidal energy.

Luke Nicholls

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