The tidal power developer30 April 2013
Former teacher Marc Paish, 38, is Chief Technical Officer at Pulse Tidal, a Sheffield-based company developing technology to generate power from ocean tides. He lives in Hull with his wife and two children.
How did you become a tidal power developer?
It was very much a garden shed type of entrepreneurial start-up. I was a physics teacher, but I had this idea about developing a tidal power concept, and so I got on with it in my own time. When it worked at a very small scale, I took the decision with a friend of mine, Howard Nimmo, to set up a company. Pulse Tidal has been around since 2004.
What does your work involve?
We're developing our own concept for a machine that generates power from tidal currents. It was my idea so we own the design for the turbine, and our objective now is to develop that idea into a product that we can then sell to the developers of tidal power projects, much like a wind turbine manufacturer.
Where did you get your inspiration from?
The idea really came from the fish-tail propulsion system I developed as a hobby for a pedal boat. A wind turbine is much like a propeller running backwards. I realised that by reversing it we could use the same kind of mechanism to generate power instead of propulsion.
What did your pupils think?
To be honest, I didn't really have the opportunity to share it with my pupils. It was very much a pipe dream at that stage. But I've been lucky to have the opportunity to talk to school kids about what we've done since we've made a go of it. Young people are very interested in our energy future.
Why is tidal power important?
Personally, I've always been a renewable power enthusiast. Tidal power is certainly a very promising resource, and it should be an excellent complement to wind. As the capacity for wind increases, the challenge of managing the grid is going to be about balancing supply and demand, and input from other power sources. Obviously there's fossil fuel but if you aspire, as we all do, to have decarbonised electricity generation, we're going to need things like tidal power.
Marc Paish testing equipment on The Humber. (c) Pulse Tidal
Why do you back a clean power target?
Anything that obliges or encourages politicians to ensure that our business has got a future is invaluable.
The challenge that all tidal power developers face is to raise investment. There's no escaping the fact that tidal power in the short to medium-term is not going to be able to survive in the open market without any sort of assistance, so its success is dependent on continued commitment from Government to make sure the economics stack up.
We need to be able to market a story which goes perhaps 10 years into the future, so anything that we can say that proves there's long-term public commitment to tidal power helps us to reassure investors.
Even if the public commitment is there today, which it undoubtedly is - there are all sorts of very useful and helpful systems that make tidal power installations viable now - the worry is how can we be sure that it's not going to disappear sometime in the future, before we've reached the point when we can compete directly with other forms of power generation. Investors need to know that the Government's commitment will last.
What was it like to set up your own business in the renewable energy sector?
When we started out, it was great. Times were good back then. For the first four years, it was going from strength to strength. Since the credit crunch, it's been much harder to raise investment so it's been a lot harder going since then. But to begin with, it was great.
What are your aspirations for the company?
We want to be the equivalent of a wind turbine manufacturer. That's the objective: in 20 years times to be manufacturing large numbers of very big machines and be installing them in tidal projects around the world.
Feeling inspired? If you want to see more clean British energy, ask your MP to support a clean power target now.
© Pulse Tidal
