SOUNDBITE: Nicola Sturgeon, Deputy First Minister, Scotland: "The Saltire Prize is Scotland's Clean Energy Challenge to the world."

TEXT SLATE: The Scottish Government has offered 10 Million British pounds (~$16 Million-U.S.   ) to the company that can best harness wave or tidal energy from the sea...for electricity.

SOUNDBITE: Nicola Sturgeon, Deputy First Minister, Scotland: "The wave and tidal energy for Scotland is massive. We have 25-percent of Europe's tidal energy potential. We have 10 percent of all of Europe's wave energy potential."

"We want to make sure that through the Saltire Prize we are focusing at the best minds and focusing efforts and ambition on picking up the pace of development of technology of getting technologies from proof of concept and through to the stage where they're able to be delivered commercially."

SOUNDBITE: Neil Kermode, Managing Director, EMEC: "This is hard. People say, oh, it shouldn't be that difficult. We've done things in the sea for a long time.  Actually, this is no trivial task. The next stage is really the very hard bit, which is making these machines work, making them work reliably and generating that industrial quantity of power."

SUPER: August 28, 2012, Orkney Island, Scotland

SOUNDBITE: Nicola Sturgeon, Deputy First Minister, Scotland: "Today is a milestone day for the Saltire Prize. Today is the launch of what we call the Grand Challenge phase and that will run from now until 2017- a five year period."

SOUNDBITE: Neil Kermode, Managing Director, EMEC:  "The starting gun has just been fired. We're now in a period where we can start measuring the performance of the machines.  We've got cables that run out to sea where the big resources are - the big waves or the strong tides. Those cables come back to land, they go to a substation and then they connect to the national grid. We've got measurement systems out at sea that measure the size of the resource. And we can measure the amount of electricity that's onshore. We think the technology is going to be extremely transferrable. Frankly, anybody who has got a government and electricity demand and a coast is actually going to be looking at marine energy. There are a number of places around the world we're already working with: China, South Korea, Chile, Canada, the States."

SOUNDBITE: Nicola Sturgeon, Deputy First Minister, Scotland: "It's quite simple, in one simple respect, that competitors have been tasked to the challenge of producing the most continuous electricity output over a two-year period above the minimum threshold that's been set. So that's the challenge."

TEXT SLATE:

Two tidal energy and two wave power companies are competing. Other companies can still enter.