One of the perks of living in Stromness, just a few minutes walk from EMEC‘s offices, is that I get to see some of what’s going on behind the headlines. Right now, something that’s going on is the decommissioning of one of the Pelamis P2 machines (the one belonging to Highlands & Islands Enterprise).
This most famous of wave energy machines was divided into its five sections, and each section lifted onto a barge. They were then cut into small enough pieces for road transport, and taken from barge to workboat and workboat to truck. I was able to grab a few photos of the last part of this process.
I perceived Pelamis as the “poster boy” for marine renewables, and I think many others did too. It was the machine that my friends, and sometimes even my mum’s friends, had heard of. The industry was always going to have to deal, at some point, with one of the big companies failing, and there’s no reason to extrapolate from this to the fate of wave energy as a whole. However, it did feel very poignant.