Marine energy in Central America?

This post is also available in: Spanish

As we head towards the next international climate change negotiations in Durban, South Africa, today’s blog comes from Zoe – our new Deputy Ambassador in El Salvador – who has been getting involved in some exciting new work to explore links between the UK and Central America as areas that are potentially very  rich in marine energy and hopefully partners for the future as we work to develop sustainable and affordable marine energy technology. Over to you Zoe…

For El Salvador, climate change is not just a predicted future threat to the people, environment, economy and security of the country. New climate trends have brought steadily more and more extreme weather events. From just 2 tropical cyclones in the whole decade of the 1980s, the frequency has now increased to 5 extreme weather events in the last 2 years. These extreme events have cost many lives and livelihoods, and caused recurrent destruction of critical infrastructure and homes, displacement of people and loss of staple agricultural crops. 3 extreme weather events in 2009, 2010 and 2011 are conservatively estimated to have cost El Salvador 6% of its GDP.

This gives El Salvador a powerful voice in international climate change negotiations.

Earlier this month, El Salvador Minister of Environment and Natural Resources, Herman Rosa Chavez, participated in a SICA Forum hosted by Canning House in London. The Forum discussed opportunities for greater regional collaboration in tackling climate change, and the pioneering approach to climate change policy now being pursued by El Salvador, focused largely on adaptation to current extreme weather trends. On his visit to the UK, the Minister shared climate data from El Salvador with experts at the Met Office Hadley Centre, and met with world leading experts in climate science and renewable energy technologies at Imperial College London and Edinburgh University. Through its relationship with the UK, El Salvador is also now receiving targeted support and benefitting from expertise through the UK Department for International Development ‘Climate and Development Knowledge Network’. We will continue to work closely together in this vital area.

In addition to this co-operation, we have been focusing on a very practical area of work between us, which is the potential of developing marine energy. The countries of Central America, lying between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, are uniquely vulnerable to climate change and the resulting extreme weather events. But so too are they well positioned to benefit from the power of their rich natural environment. Central America already benefits from wind farms, solar energy and hydroelectric projects. But the huge potential for generating renewable energy from waves and tides along its coastlines is not yet fully being realised.

The UK is a world centre of excellence in marine energy technologies, with companies and specialist departments at universities dedicated to researching and testing ways of generating power from wave and tidal energy. And so, earlier this month, professors from Edinburgh University in Scotland held a conference for professors from El Salvador, Costa Rica and Nicaragua, to exchange ideas and expertise on marine energy. The Central American professors visited the university’s state-of-the-art wave tank, which enables researchers to generate waves using computers, to carry out experiments with models of new technologies. The UK coasts also provide excellent conditions for testing models in real conditions – but we didn’t take the professors out to see the cold and windy North Sea!

Research and development of marine energy technologies are expensive. But Central America does not have to start at the beginning. We are sharing the mistakes we have made and the lessons we have learnt in the UK, and will continue to support the development of marine energy in the region. We’ll keep you updated on all this work as we continue to progress, moving towards the next regional clean energy conference to be held in San Salvador in 2012.