Sea-bed leasing for power generation to begin soon

The Crown Estate, which owns the UK's territorial seabed, is to begin the leasing process to allow potential power generators to bid for leases on particular parcels of Scotland's sea-bed in order to deploy power generation equipment there. Although some equipment has been undergoing testing off Orkney for a couple of years the technology is in its infancy and the 'prize' is apparently the Pentland Firth channel between mainland Scotland and Orkney, where there are particularly strong (and dangerous) tidal currents. I expect it will be a few years before the technical issues are ironed out to allow this method of energy generation to be viable and durable enough to even begin to meet the target of installing 1 gigawatt of generation capacity for the national grid to be in place by 2020.