The Scottish Renewables 3rd Marine Energy conference last week in Inverness - sponsored by Highlands and Islands - was one of the most vibrant and exiciting wave and tidal events I’ve been at in the past few years. I was delighted to be asked to give an opening keynote. Here it is in full. (more…)
When I mention to friends, family and neighbors that the Highlands and Islands is leading the world in the development of a whole new energy industry, they tend to look at best quizzical, and at worst disbelieving. I like to remind them that in 1976 Dores bay in Loch Ness was the test bed for Scotland’s first wave device, Stephen Salter’s Nodding Duck. The fate of that technology was contentious, shelved some say as a result of closed door meetings in Whitehall and secret memos from rival technologies. (more…)