The £50 million wave fund that no one wants

Money eh? You can’t give it away. That’s the thing about having £50 million going begging – no one wants to take it off your hands.

Actually, no, wait a minute. You would have thought it would be pretty easy to give away. However, if you’ve got £50 million and you want to distribute it to wave power projects you might find yourself struggling.

Says The Times:

You might expect that an island nation offering substantial grants through a wave and tidal energy grant scheme would have applicants queueing up. But a £50 million fund has succeeded in attracting precisely two applications – and both were rejected.

The Marine Renewables Deployment Fund was condemned by business groups yesterday as a failure. Instead of tempting companies to defray part of their costs with taxpayers’ money, ministers made the qualifying conditions too tough, analysts concluded. It was now likely that companies would shift operations to more supportive countries.