He calculates that if the UK installs 100 megawatts of tidal power a year as part of a growing global market, by 2040 the industry could be contributing £4bn a year to Britain’s economy.
Up to 14,500 jobs would be created either building or maintaining offshore tidal power systems – many of them in coastal or remote areas which the Government is keen to level up.
Might be lovely stuff, might be a disaster, but those jobs are a cost, not a benefit.
Just to inform my ignorance, what does 100 MW of tidal cost? Is there a working example anywhere? Does are the geographical pre-requisites? Is there even one site a year until 2040?
It’s not even the principle that raises the question, it’s the granularity of 100MW per year that I find puzzling.
How many megawatt hours per year? It’s capacity that counts.
Before he stopped blogging, Euan Mearns and his contributors did a lot of work on tidal power. The big problem (for the UK at least) is that the panacea of peak power at one site cancelling out the lows of another doesn’t work in practice. It will actually produce even more “peaky” electricity than we already get from wind. You can still read the articles here:
http://euanmearns.com/?s=tidal+power
These people will ruin us. Affordable energy is essential to a working economy. Where is the money going to come from to pay for these green jobs when all the people who were doing the useful stuff have been put out of work?
The trouble with tidal power is that it is enormously damaging to the environment: just look at the proposed barrage in the Severn Estuary and the rock mining in Cornwall needed to build it.
I know, let’s piss off the Welsh and the Cornish, by wrecking their countryside…now can we do the Scots as well? How about pumped storage in the Great Glen!
Just wait until the ecoloons see the scale of the wetlands damage. Bring popcorn.
The State won’t move a finger as pensioners bring the M25 to a standstill. What do you think will happen when green groups attack these developments? They might get started by 2040, not finished.
Bloody hell. In the 1970s in Geography, we were being told that tidal was the future. Countless hours of Tomorrows World were deducated to it.
What magic have they now, that can make it work after 50 years of engineering failure ?
However true it might be that jobs created where there were none before is a cost, they aren’t a cost if they are simply replacing jobs that disappeared (e.g. garage mechanics replacing ostlers), and even better if the activity gets people off benefits.
I’ve seen the Rance tidal power station in Brittany. Built 1966 and not repeated, at least by France. How many could you build in Britain? One on the Bristol Channel and one on the Solway Firth perhaps. Related, but different, you could try tapping the currents through the Pentland Firth. So – essentially no economies of scale, everything a huge one-off project.
Mind you I’ve also seen the tide mill at Woodbridge in Suffolk. WKPD: “The first recording of a tide mill on this site was a medieval mill in 1170”. The present mill still works – well worth seeing. You can combine it with a visit to Sutton Hoo. Woodbridge itself is a delightful town. It all adds up to East Angular delish.
They did one in Northern Ireland, which exported 11.6GWh to the grid over about 8 years. I have no idea if that is good or bad, but it was more of an experimental piece of kit and supposedly worked well.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaGen
Water is a more concentrated energy source than wind or solar but still nothing like gas or oil. The Pentland Firth tidal race is about 4 knots, or the average tidal range is about 10 foot. For comparison hydroelectric is 100 to 500 foot head.
I blame the moon.
Jimmers – 11.6GWh over 8 years (11,600MWh /8 /365 /24) gives 0.165MWh per hour, or 165KWh / hour. Enough to run 1 and a half 1KW electric heaters continually. I expect it wasn’t continuous, just generating at high and low tide, as per David Ward’s comment. But basically nothing, either way.
svs
x100? I agree it’s still nothing…
Bugger. Got the powers of 10 out. 165KW is 165 1KW bar heaters. Sorry.
Still not impressive.
Crippling the country so that politicos can virtue-signal. If only we could get into statute that UK CO2-reduction policy not move faster than – say – countries responsible in aggregate for 60% world emissions
… and only then if the poliscum and ecomentalists have demonstrated how to live without using any fossil fuels or plastics for at least 10 years.
“The Government has estimated that about 10 gigawatts of electricity could be produced by harnessing tidal power in the UK, with its potential higher in the winter as tides are stronger ”
How the hell did they work that one out? Tides are due to the gravitational interaction of the earth & the moon (& to a small extent the sun). The energy drives them is actually coming from orbital decay. It’s utterly & completely independent of seasons on earth. Yes you may be more likely to get storm surges in winter. But that’s going to work both ways, on average. Just that lower than normal highs & higher than normal lows don’t tend to make the news
Ottojring said:
“What magic have they now, that can make it work after 50 years of engineering failure ?”
Taxpayers’ money.
Dave Ward,
Intermittency isn’t necessarily a problem, as long as it’s predictable. Unlike wind or solar, tides can be predicted very precisely, months in advance. This means you could schedule your fossil fuel plants to power down when the tides are in full swing, and power up again at the crest/trough of the wave.
svs,
Instead of one bar electric heaters (do they even still exist?) Do it in Tesla charges.
I think the fact that there are thousands of windmills currently posing a danger to shipping, but at the very most, a handful of these things tells you all you need to know about how feasible this idea really is.
BTW if you’re in a masochistic mood the Beeb has a drama based on ClimateGate on tonight. I guess it’s all part of the COP26 jamboree.
Let me guess: evil white male right-wing cackling wax-moustachioed hackers in the pay of the Koch brothers and Big Oil plant fake evidence of there being no global warming; all in order to make look bad our heroic, virtuous and ultra-diverse climate scientists (who are all only concerned with saving humanity and have no interest at all in money and status).
Could be, BiW. I’ll bet the audience won’t hear much from the benighted IT man and his complaints that the models were junk and that the original temperature data had been “adjusted” so many times that they had no idea what the original data were. Lost for ever.
I’m not sure what evidence there is that Climategate was the result of a ‘hack’, rather than a disgruntled colleague copying some files and passing them on. Phil Jones was apparently a real shit to work for/with (hardly unusual in the realms of academe).
I quite like the idea of building sodding great dams either end of Loch Ness to turn it into a pumped storage reservoir. As the low reservoir would have to be the sea at Inverness, the increasing salt content of the Loch over years would see off Nessie too. Win-win…
What Tim the Coder stipulated…. The damage to the environment would be massive, since it would involve drastically changing the salinity of estuaries, thus wreaking havoc on the local biomes.
A harsh lesson learned from the Deltaworks in the Netherlands, which had ….a tad… more knock-on effects than predicted. And cost several gobshites of cash and several decades more to mitigate..
And incidentally.. If it were so easy to generate electricity from tidal, there would have been a couple of generators built into that particular set of waterworks already, as would have been in the Afsluitdijk.
Maybe there’s some odds and ends there that make the cost/benefit equation such that it isn’t worth bothering with.
@ Tim
That is due to the madly stupid idea that public sector GDP is valued at cost so if the public sector spends £Kbillion on something – that raises GDP by £Kbillion even if the something reduces the value of stuff available to the consumer.
Given how long they have been talking about a M4 relief road and worrying over the potential for damage to the Severn wetlands I really can’t see a tidal barrage getting approved this century
You really couldn’t build something like the Llanwern steelworks these days
@ Andrew M
“This means you could schedule your fossil fuel plants to power down when the tides are in full swing, and power up again at the crest/trough of the wave”
That’s precisely the sort of frequent thermal cycling that reduces their efficiency and lifetime. The graphs that Euan & Co produced showed some surprisingly rapid changes in output – far more abrupt that the normal daily variations which the grid has coped with for decades.
A US Dept of Energy predecessor (ERDA) in the 70s spent millions upon millions trying to make the case for tidal power. Involved research laboratories, aerospace companies with airfoil expertise, niche companies with salt water corrosion experience and hordes of hangers-on all for naught.
bloke in spain
October 18, 2021 at 11:52 am
“ “The Government has estimated that about 10 gigawatts of electricity could be produced by harnessing tidal power in the UK, with its potential higher in the winter as tides are stronger ”
How the hell did they work that one out? Tides are due to the gravitational interaction of the earth & the moon (& to a small extent the sun). The energy drives them is actually coming from orbital decay. It’s utterly & completely independent of seasons on earth. Yes you may be more likely to get storm surges in winter. But that’s going to work both ways, on average. Just that lower than normal highs & higher than normal lows don’t tend to make the news “
They don’t even get that right. The largest tidal ranges largest the equinoxes and lowest during the solstices. I’ve just had a quick look at Portland for this year:
21 Sept 2.2m
21 Dec 1.6m
There’s also a 19 year cycle and.most likely longer ones as well, but I’m not worried about those.
I have sailed through the Pentland Firth during a Force 8 gale ,and I think that any kit trying to generate power there would have to be very massive and even then I would not place a bet on it lasting long.Another factor that seems to be forgotten is marine growth.How long before everything is encrusted with barnacles and weed even with anti fouling in place.
“rhoda klapp
October 18, 2021 at 8:21 am
Just to inform my ignorance, what does 100 MW of tidal cost? Is there a working example anywhere? Does are the geographical pre-requisites? Is there even one site a year until 2040?”
This 320 MW one in Wales costs 1.6 billion so 100MW would be roughly a half a billion dollars. And that’s at roughly 20% efficiency. Which would give you about 44 GWhrs per year. The UK uses something like 287 TERRAwatt hours per year. So, by my crude calculations, that would only take 6,000 years of construction before you were able to meet the UK’s energy demands.
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/06/13/tidal-power-still-expensive-still-unlikely-contribute-much/
“There’s also a 19 year cycle and.most likely longer ones as well, but I’m not worried about those.”
But you do have to worry about those. Orbital perigee of the moon precesses on a cycle at odds with earth’s orbit around the sun,. So those high tides should move through the year on that cycle. Orbital dynamics means they’re locked but that doesn’t mean they coincide except over very long periods.
Tides are due to the gravitational interaction of the earth & the moon (& to a small extent the sun). The energy drives them is actually coming from orbital decay.
The lunar orbit is increasing, not decaying.
The (lunar) tides are due to the gravitational pull of the Moon on Earth’s seas and oceans as the Earth rotates. In a very complex interplay (much more complicated than Newton’s phantom “ocean bulges”) the tides transfer angular momentum from the Earth’s spin to the Moon’s orbit. The Earth day lengthens as the Moon moves further away.