A PASSION for surfing has perhaps served Andrew Scott well during his career at the sharp end of the wave and tidal energy sector in the last couple of decades.

The chief executive of Orbital Marine Power has seen plenty of ebb and flow as millions of pounds have been invested in the bid to build up the next big wave of renewable energy in Scotland.

There was disappointment when Pelamis Wave Power, the renewables pioneer Mr Scott had served for 13 years, came unstuck in 2014, unable to secure the funding it needed to further develop its technology despite the promise of its endeavours. But, with Orbital now taking major strides towards commercialising its floating tidal platform, his faith in marine renewables remains as strong as ever.

That conviction has much to do with the millions invested in developing the technology Orbital, formed originally as Scotrenewables in 2002, beginning to bear fruit. It is also anchored on the rich maritime heritage, infrastructure and engineering skills which he believes give Scotland an advantage in the renewable sector.

“I still maintain there is a lot of sense and logic in looking to the sources of wave and tidal for an industrial opportunity,” said Mr Scott, who holds degrees in mechanical engineering and energy. “It is one that Scotland and the UK is very well aligned to capture at the lowest cost.”

Orbital recently raised £7 million from a crowdfunding campaign, which the company will use to build the first production model of its O2 two-megawatt turbine over the next year.

The platform will be deployed in waters off the European Marine Engineering Centre (EMEC) in Orkney, with Orbital noting that the floating platform will be capable of being towed and easily maintained and installed. Its development comes after the company’s first turbine, the 2MW SR2000, was launched in 2016. Built at the Harland and Wolff yard in Belfast, the inaugural platform was assessed at Orbital’s EMEC test berth in the Fall of Warness, south of the island of Eday.

Mr Scott said the test conditions are breathtaking. “The resource is phenomenal,” he said. “Pentland Firth is massive. Even [in the] Fall of Warness you are talking [about] a big channel.

“[In] the spring tide, water is moving through that at the best part of 10 miles an hour for 20 hours a day. Water being 800 times the density of air, that is a really concentrating form of power. It feels like the world is moving around you.”

Mr Scott said that £30m has been invested so far in developing the technology at Orbital since the company’s formation, with backers including Total, the French oil and gas giant, Fred Olsen, ABB and DP Energy. There has also been investment from Scottish Enterprise and the entrepreneur Matt McGrath, who is now a major shareholder.

Highlights along the way have included becoming the first company to grid-connect a floating tidal turbine in 2011. In 2017, the company’s SR2000 then moved into continuous grid-connected operation, in doing so becoming the “world’s most powerful operational tidal turbine”.

“A real endorsement of the engineering to date is that, over its first year of continuous operation, that turbine generated over three-and-a-quarter gigawatt-hours,” Mr Scott said. “To contextualise that, in 12 months it generated more power than the entire wave and tidal energy industry in Scotland had in the preceding years up until 2016.

“There had been big tidal projects that had been quite successful, but they had never managed to maintain power generation.”

Born in Paisley, Mr Scott had an itinerant childhood thanks to his father’s work in the oil industry. He spent time in the Middle East and South America, and was sometimes schooled overseas, before studying mechanical engineering at the University of Strathclyde. On graduation he embarked on a career in the semiconductor industry, joining NEC in Livingston, which employed around 5,000 people at the time. However, Mr Scott said that it “became immediately apparent to me that I wasn’t going to be a fit in a big company”.

He first began to think of moving into renewables early in the millennium, not long after the first onshore commercial wind farms had come on stream in Cornwall in the mid-1990s. His interest arose while he was coaching rugby in Australia, when he developed a deep love of surfing.

To facilitate a move into the sector, Mr Scott undertook a postgraduate degree in energy at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, one of the first to offer qualifications with a renewable element built in.

“When I was at university, doing renewables and engineering, I found out there were people trying to make electricity out of wave energy,” he said. “I thought you can’t get a better occupation! You are only going to get sent to places where there are going to be lots of waves.”

Mr Scott added: “I think the attraction of working in renewables is quite obvious for young people. You feel you are making a positive contribution.”

While some of his contemporaries went into the onshore wind industry, Mr Scott secured a job with Pelamis Wave Power in 2002, just as it had secured its first major venture capital investment.

Looking back on that time, he said there was a “heady” mix of optimism and naivety around the movement to get wave and tidal power up and running. There were people from non-marine backgrounds coming with ideas that worked well on paper, he said, but sometimes lacking the practical understanding of how they would be developed.

And while private sector backing was forthcoming, it was not, in the final analysis, from the right type of investors. “Venture capitalists have a role to play in the cycle, but they are generally not patient capital, that’s where some of the naivety was at an early stage,” he said. “This wasn’t going to be a dot.com boom.

“Marine engineering costs millions and it takes quite a long time. We have got better at our engineering, so we can hopefully avoid [problems] and accelerate some development paths.”

Mr Scott said more than half a billion pounds of private sector investment has been pumped into wave and tidal technology in the UK over the last 10 to 15 years. The public sector has done its share of lifting too, he added, including the “pioneering” investment made in EMEC. That has allowed companies to focus purely on developing their technology without worrying about practical matters such as planning consents for test beds.

Ultimately, it was not enough for Pelamis. While the commercialisation of onshore and offshore wind has dramatically brought down generation costs, wave and marine engineering has spent the last 10 to 15 years in the research and development phase. “Wave energy is a unique engineering challenge,” he said. “It is probably three orders of magnitude more complex than tidal, and for those reasons more expensive. While Pelamis was a very clever bit of engineering, it couldn’t get away from the fact costs were going to start quite high.”

He added: “It was a hard lesson for me, because I put a lot of years into it. But you brush yourself off and figure out what you are going to do next. I was kind of fortunate I was approached for this job. Orbital Marine Technology has a lot of similarities to wave technology, in that it is floating.

“I always thought it was a clever and novel way of tackling the challenge of tidal energy. [I] very much endorse the principles on which they have approached solving the problem. They are the right ones that I believe tidal energy needs to be a low-cost solution.”

Six Questions

What countries have you most enjoyed travelling to, for business or leisure, and why?

I’ve been fortunate to have travelled a lot – much of it used to be for surfing, so I’ve had fun adventures off the beaten track in countries like Morocco and Indonesia, looking for waves. I also race triathlons and time-trialling and it’s a simple pleasure but getting away to places like Majorca where every day you can train in the sun, it’s hot, the roads are smooth and the water warm: bliss.

When you were a child, what was your ideal job? Why did it appeal?
Marine biologist. I loved the sea and being in water! 

What was your biggest break in business?
Arguably getting my current role, it’s my first executive position and has been a steep learning curve from day one, but I’m fortunate to have some great people around to support and motivate me.

What was your worst moment in business?
Working for so many years at Pelamis Wave Power and have it end in administration – but you have to pick yourself up, recognise the lessons, take the positives and apply yourself to the next challenge. 

Who do you most admire and why?
I wouldn’t claim to have a favourite but being an engineering graduate from the University of Strathclyde, I would highlight Professor James Blyth. As one of the earliest pioneers of electricity generation from wind turbines, even powering his house with one in the 1880s, he’d be more famous if the world hadn’t got distracted by fossil fuels!

What book are you reading and what music are you listening to? What was the last film you saw?
I’m a fan of biographies – I finished David Attenborough’s recently: an amazing life. For music, I mostly have to listen to what my six-year-old daughter plays. I try influencing her by interspersing with the likes of AC/DC and JJ Cale but I’m not sure it’s working. And the last film I watched was Outlaw King which, as a Scot, is emotive and gruesome.