Portugal surfs wave power while Britain flirts with nuclear and dirty coal

Portugal has just inaugurated the world’s first commercial scale wave power station. It will eventually produce 21 MW, enough to power 14,000 homes.

The Guardian reported this, saying: “…..  the Portuguese are investing heavily in other renewable technologies….. In the past three years, the country has also trebled its hydroelectric capacity and quadrupled its wind power sources – northern Portugal has the world’s biggest wind farm with more than 130 turbines and a factory that builds the 40m-long blades.

Pinho wants Portugal to rival Denmark or Japan in its commitment to developing renewables industries – he predicts his country will generate 31% of all its power from clean sources by 2020, compared with Britain’s target of 15%. The Portuguese target means increasing the generation of electricity from renewable sources from 20% in 2005 to 60% in 2020.”

“The €9m (£7.14m) first phase of the Aguçadoura project, which involves the energy firms Enersis and Energias de Portrugal, has been helped partly by the Portuguese government agreeing to guarantee a premium for the electricity the station will generate via a feed-in tariff of 25c per KWh. The project has also been given a €1.25m grant from the Portuguese Agência de Inovação.”

The company building the wave generators is Scottish, raising questions about why New Labour is not committed enough to being the leader in wave energy, given the available technical skills and potential wave resources.

New Labour seems overly enamoured with coal and nuclear at the expense of viable renewables today. So do the Conservatives. Indeed, a campaign is being waged to ‘plug the energy gap’ with coal and nuclear. The carrot being waved is the avoidance of blackouts and also lower bills.

Meanwhile a Portuguese Minister can highlight his country’s ambition to be to renewables what Finland (Nokia) is to phones.

His UK equivalent’s ambition is to invite the French to build a network of incredibly expensive nuclear power stations and ignore the wind and wave potential of this island. Money talks.

Farid Bakht