The £20 million of annual subsidies earmarked by the government for tidal power in the upcoming Contracts for Difference (CfD) auctions will be insufficient to support the build out of the pioneering MeyGen tidal stream project, the Scottish National Party’s House of Commons leader has warned.
On Wednesday (24 November), the government announced that tidal stream projects would be given first access to £20 million of yearly funding in the fourth CfD allocation round due start in December.
In a special debate on tidal power in the House of Commons on Thursday, Ian Blackford MP said his party was “glad to see some movement” on support for the technology.
But he said there is still “a way to go yet.”
“Every little may help, but if we are serious about the scale of the opportunity, we need to go further,” Blackford said, pointing to a previous call by the SNP for ring-fenced CfD funding of £71 million for marine renewables.
He told MPs that the £20 million budget for tidal turbines would restrain the development of the MeyGen project, which currently consists of 6MW of turbines generating electricity from the tidal streams in the Pentland Firth between the Orkney Islands and the Scottish mainland.
The size of the pot means the MeyGen project will “certainly not” be looking to deploy the full 80MW of additional generation for which it already has planning permission, Blackford said: “The ability to expand from the current 6 MW installed in MeyGen phase 1 is restrained by the investment that has been put in place in this round.
“It would be a much-reduced figure.”
Blackford said £71 million would have enabled the deployment of 100 MW of tidal capacity in the “very near term” from planned projects.
He said that the extra funding would stimulate an industry in which the UK has a technological edge over the rest of the world. It would also put the country on track to increase tidal output by 2050 to the 15% of UK electricity demand, which a recent Royal Society paper said tidal power could provide.
But responding for the government, energy minister Greg Hands said the shortage of tidal projects in the pipeline means “virtually every developer” bidding in the auction could win a contract if the pot size was set at £71 million.
He said: “It allows us to have a competitive process between all of the different parties that may be interested, and then to make sure that at least £20 million goes towards these projects. It is not the same as granting funding.”
The government confirmed the parameters of the auctions in its final budget notice for the fourth allocation round on Thursday.