The Treasury is the usual suspect here, but there's a systematic lack of vision at high level in both the state and private sectors. Engineering doesn't get the same respect as making a fortune from land ownership.
It’s one of the reasons I left.
I don’t think British society is ready to address these issues either, there’s still a lot of unacknowledged classism and racism.
Overall, I’d sum up the British attitude as “it’s not that great here, but it’s the best country in the world”.
That is, there’s a lot of cynicism, but people assume the balance in the UK is as good as it gets.
It really isn’t.
Not quite sure why, since nearly every wave power device is just a carefully shaped bit of concrete dropped into the sea and some generators.
I could make you a 500 watt wave power device in an afternoon and $500 in materials (big plastic oil drum as an air reservoir, big concrete weight, hobby jet engine expander as the air to electricity convertor), and within a year it would have paid for it's materials cost (at wind subsidy rates).
(I'm excluding the cost of a power interconnect to land here, but the cost of these scales favourably, so ends up not being a big fraction of the project cost for big projects).
Yet somehow commercial projects seem to have decades of payback time even when given significant electricity subsidies.
Would the plastic oil drum solution even last a year? A big problem with these things is that the sea is a corrosive fluid with a lot of kinetic energy in it, and it tends to destroy things.