Ministers pulling funding from a wave energy body shows that it may be time to finally admit that we cannot harness the power of the seas, argues Herald columnist Alan Simpson.

In Scotland, you are never far away from the sea, indeed if you’re lucky enough to live by the coast all you need to do is look out of the window.

It has helped shape the country and provide much of it’s prosperity as traders have sailed around the globe for centuries exchanging goods.

The sea has also brought tragedy though, with the fast flowing tides and dark, cold waters frequently claiming the lives of sailors and fishermen.

So it is natural that we looked to the sea to help provide our electricity with offshore windfarms all around the coast providing clean and cheap energy.

Of course, Scotland is also blessed, if you can describe it as that, as being very windy which is also great for drying clothes but no so good playing golf on a links course.

But it has long been thought that the real bonanza will come through harnessing the tides to provide our energy and then export the expertise to other countries with similarly strong tides.

It is all a heady mix and led former First Minister Alex Salmond to declare that Scotland has the potential to become the ‘Saudi Arabia of renewables’.

To be fair he had a point, but Scotland’s green energy ambitions have been thrown into doubt after a flagship wave power firm warned it could collapse following ministers’ decision to pull funding from their own wave energy body.

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Edinburgh-based Mocean Energy says the decision to axe cash for Wave Energy Scotland (WES) could wipe out jobs, destroy investment and sink years of work to turn Scotland’s seas into a clean-energy powerhouse.

The firm warned ministers the “likely” outcome is closure — with 13 jobs lost and millions stripped from the Scottish economy.One of Scotland’s flagship wave power firms has warned it could be forced out of business after ministers pulled funding from the wave energy body they created.

Edinburgh-based Mocean Energy says the decision to axe cash for Wave Energy Scotland (WES) could wipe out jobs, destroy investment and sink years of work to turn Scotland’s seas into a clean-energy powerhouse.

The firm warned ministers the “likely” outcome is closure — with 13 jobs lost and millions stripped from the Scottish economy.

It all throws Scotland’s bid to lead the world in wave and tidal power into doubt after ministers axed all funding.

Ministers have pumped over £70m in public money into the wave energy company since it was formed in 2014 with then energy minister Fergus Ewing fronting the launch.

But key funding for WES has been terminated with immediate effect, leaving the organisation with no finance from next month.

Now in stark appeal to ministers, Mocean Energy has laid bare their view of the real-world consequences of Holyrood ’s financial choices warning cuts will lead to the loss of highly-skilled engineering jobs and the collapse of a major Scottish clean-tech success story.

Mocean says the situation is now so serious that the “likely” outcome is the winding up of the company itself, with the immediate loss of 13 direct jobs and more than £2.1 million being sucked out of the Scottish economy.

The firm says Scotland also risks losing the chance for Mocean to deliver £37 million in revenue and 50 jobs within five years - growth that would have been rooted in Scotland, feeding a wider industrial supply chain.

It also warns that the collapse of WES funding will have a “crippling” impact on Scotland’s marine energy industry as a whole - a sector the company says has the potential to deliver £8 billion to the Scottish economy and 15,000 jobs by 2050.

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The company has directly challenged the Scottish Government’s repeated insistence that it remains committed to renewable innovation and long-term net zero goals.

WES was established by the Scottish Government in 2014 and has been funded by ministers ever since, specifically to crack the technological and engineering barriers holding wave power back.

It was meant to take wave energy out of the realm of hopeful prototypes and turn it into a real industry - with Scottish companies building machines, testing them in Scottish waters, and selling them worldwide.

Ministers and government agencies have long argued that Scotland’s geography gives it a natural advantage in taking advantage of wave power - powerful Atlantic wave conditions, some of the strongest tidal resources in Europe, and world-renowned test facilities like the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Orkney .

A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “The decision to reduce Scottish Government support to WES was made in the context of an agreement for the company being self-sustaining beyond a certain point. It is also in light of a challenging fiscal envelope and the need to make difficult decisions regarding spending in 2026/27 and beyond.

But while the figures being bandied about are hugely impressive are they correct or just a guesstimate?

History will point to the latter being correct unfortunately as companies have been trying for decades to find a way to harness the power of the tides with little success so far.

I visited the small town of Hammerfest in Norway nearly 20 years ago to see what was being hailed as the future of energy - namely a tidal turbine that worked for 22 hours a day.

It was backed by industry giants ScottishPower and Norwegian state oil company Statoil and it was hoped that they would eventually be made in Scotland and placed in the Pentland Firth.

Prototypes were sunk around Islay but since then nothing significant has happened and the two firms have sold their stakes in the project.

This begs the question, if two energy giants cannot make tidal power commercially viable then who can?

Ministers may simply have decided that there was little hope of a breakthrough at WES so maybe it's time to focus on other things.

And who can really blame them for taking that attitude - taxpayers cannot foot the bill for possibilities forever.

So where does this leave our future energy generation? Well, increasingly it's left blowing in the wind, which is not the most reliable source.

Although Scotland seems to be very windy all the time, in reality it's not as bad as we think and that leaves us with a major problem.

Until we can build enough battery storage facilities to keep electricity generated on windy days to be used when it;s flat clam then we have to rely on other sources.

Scottish ministers are ideologically opposed to nuclear so when the Torness power station is finally switched off in a few years time then we really are at the mercy of the weather to keep the lights on.

Of course we can import electricity from England - and we frequently do - but it's pretty poor state of affairs when our green credentials have been lauded for decades.

But it appears that we have to wave goodbye to harnessing the power of the seas, perhaps forever.

© Herald Scotland