The high costs associated with ocean energy technologies combined with the unproven status of the technologies have hindered investors’ confidence in the sector. There is a clear need for the sector to identify ways to facilitate technology development and deployment, to reduce the associated risk for investors; thus ensuring that wave and tidal technologies could reduce their costs and achieve competiveness with other renewable energy sources.
Developing and implementing technology-specific funds and key performance indicators (KPIs) ensures that technology development can happen without placing excessive expectations or unrealistic targets on a particular technology, thus reducing risk for both developers and investors. In this context, the Integrated Energy Roadmap initiative launched by the European Commission (EC)
has already identified KPIs defined for the whole sector. The development of standards, such as the one being developed by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), which clearly define required levels of survivability and reliability for each TRL, would provide a clearer indication of the development of the technologies, as they improve towards commercialisation.