Wave Energy

One of the emerging new energy technologies is wave energy. According to the Scotsman newspaper, a £10 million ($20 million) project is set to go online next year.

Edinburgh-based Ocean Power Delivery (OPD) is supplying the four wave-energy converters or "Pelamis", named after a type of sea snake, for the Orkney scheme. Each one is about 520ft long and creates 750 kilowatts of power.

This does not seem to be a commercially viable project right now and requires the support of public funds, but it will teach interesting lessons for the further development of the technology. The Scotish Executive has ambitious goals for renewable energy:

The Executive has targets to generate increasing amounts of electricity from renewables, with them providing 18 per cent of needs by 2010 and 40 per cent by 2020. Scotland is expected meet its 18 per cent renewable electricity target during 2007.

The United Kingdom is not the leading country in wind energy, but has made some progress in this area:

The wind sector now generates more than 2,000 megawatts across the UK, enough to power half the homes in Scotland.

Of course Scotland only has 10% of the population of the UK, so this translates into 5% of domestic energy use. I can't quite square that number with Germany's capacity of 20,000 megawatts that translates into 6% of all electricity use according to Wikipedia. UK and Germany are country of roughly equal size (population 60 million vs. 80 million). I would think that domestic electricity use is a larger part of the total than this suggests.