The winners of the Marine Renewables Proving Fund (MRPF) include two wave-energy firms: Pelamis and Aquamarine Power; and four tidal firms: Marine Current Turbines (MCT), Atlantis Resources, Hammerfest Strøm and Voith Hydro.

Only the first three are based in the UK, with the final three coming from Australia, Norway and Germany respectively.

The government unveiled the MRPF in June 2009 as part of its Renewable Energy Strategy, in part to quiet the controversy that had arisen surrounding yet another acronym – the Marine Renewables Deployment Fund (MRDF).

The £50m MRDF was established in 2004 as a figurative carrot hanging before the emerging marine renewables sector to get it over the final hump before commercialisation.

But in reality, no firm has gotten anywhere near the final hump, let alone the money. Several firms have applied for MRDF grants; all have been rejected due to the government’s stringent criteria, which include the need for three months of test data from a full-scale device.

With criticism mounting, the government decided to create a smaller fund – the MRPF – to act as a half-solution for a handful of leading marine-energy firms. Its hope was that one lump of public money would lead to an even larger lump of private finance.

Stephen Wyatt, director of the Carbon Trust’s marine-energy accelerator programme, says that part of the plan has gone off without a hitch – as the six firms have leveraged the MRPF’s £22m to obtain nearly twice as much again in private funding.

“There are quite a few deals for the companies sitting around this table that definitely wouldn’t have happened without the [MRPF],” Wyatt says. The Carbon Trust is a not-for-profit company set up by the government to act as a catalyst in the UK’s transition to a low-carbon economy.

A total of 31 firms applied for the MRDF; 12 were brought in for interviews, and nine progressed to the stage of due diligence.

All six will use the funds to refine their latest prototypes: Pelamis’ P2; Aquamarine’s Oyster 2; MCT’s SeaGen; Hammerfest Strøm’s HS-1000; Atlantis’ AK-1000; and Voith Hydro’s as-yet-unnamed tidal turbine. The devices range in size from the P2’s 750 kilowatts to SeaGen’s 1.2 megawatts.

The SeaGen is already deployed in Northern Ireland’s Strangford Loch, while the other five are all slated for deployment within the next two years at the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney.

The Carbon Trust’s Wyatt reckons that generating one kilowatt hour from tidal energy currently costs around £0.15 and wave energy £0.25. In comparison, coal-fired electricity costs around £0.05.