Plans to generate electricity from the waves of the Bristol Channel should be financed by a new £20 million government grant, a local MP urged this week.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change has put up the cash and is inviting companies and organisations across the UK to bid for a share.

The money will be used to cover some of the start-up costs associated with producing electricity from wave energy, powering what are basically underwater windmills, and to underwrite at least two pilot projects.

And MP Ian Liddell-Grainger said the Bristol Channel, with the world’s second-highest tide, was the obvious place for developing technology to be put to the test.

Ministers claim that marine power has the potential to provide up to 20 per cent of current electricity demand in the United Kingdom, as well as to help the country reach its climate targets, and to generate thousands of jobs.

Mr Liddell-Grainger said the funding should help the UK get on the same footing as other countries such as Norway and the Netherlands where prototype tidal stream generators are already up and running.

He said the Bristol Channel was an obvious location for the emerging technology to be put to the test.

But this week, Professor Chris Binnie, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a world authority on water technology, warned problems still needed to be overcome.

“The Bristol Channel, with its high tidal range, is a good site for tidal energy but there are some restrictions,” he said. “Wave energy is still in its development phase and the West Somerset coast is not as exposed as the Cornish coast further west.”

Professor Binnie, who lives at Wootton Courtenay and is involved in a possible scheme to put an electricity-generating tidal lagoon between Watchet and Minehead, added that the latest prototype turbine, which utilised tidal streams, was working well in tests.

“However, its seven-metre diameter turbine blades require about three metres of water over the top of them to avoid small craft, and about five metres to avoid the slow-moving bottom water,” he said.

“Thus such a system requires a minimum of about 15 metres depth of water at low spring tides and this has to be out of the shipping lanes. This would limit the area where it could be deployed in the Bristol Channel.”

Mr Liddell-Grainger pointed out that an experimental tidal stream generator was sited off Foreland Point, near Lynmouth, for some years.

“Tidal stream generators could be anchored to the sea bed without the need for dams or impounding walls, both of which would slow the water’s rate of flow and cause more silt to be deposited,” he said.

“When this country is looking so desperately for ways to become carbon-neutral it makes obvious sense to look at the stretch of water which offers the best chance of cheap, economic tidal energy generation,

“We have the added advantage of an existing link to the National Grid via Hinkley Point, so relatively little land-based infrastructure should be required.

“I am delighted the Government has taken this step to encourage entrepreneurship in the energy sector and to unlock the potential of the sea to deliver clean electricity.

“But I would really advance the case that the Bristol Channel has a significant role to play in that process.”