Our entire island is surrounded by a coastline with two tides a day. There is probably enough energy there to power the whole of Europe. So what's stopping us? Environmentalists!
Yep. I have a customer who owns a renewable energy company. They literally own wind turbines and gas recovery units from land fill sites. I was talking with her last week and she was saying that she also does consulting jobs. I asked why we didn’t have loads of tidal power and she said it’s due to the changes in the environment as tides bring in and wash out silt etc and if you barrier it off then you change this dynamic. What she did say is that wave power is less damaging but hellishly expensive to maintain.
I love wind turbines , some hate them but the hum of them as you walk buy in Cornwall last month on a cl site and you could hear a hum as they went round. The problem is not every likes them and getting planning permission is hard, same as solar farms but I don’t think the U.K. can produce enough from the sun alone but all three. Like most things moneys at play, we could all be driving hydroelectric cars by now but all the big energy giants won’t let that happen any time soon.
Someone made a brilliant point a while back. We keep hearing that renewables are no good because for instance wind turbines make electricity at night when there’s little demand and we can’t store it. So they said well use that power at night to make clean hydrogen and store that instead. Then burn the hydrogen when the wind isn’t blowing.
They were talking about this in several places at least as far back as 2009 EG: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17090-sea-snake-generates-electricity-with-every-wave/ This is another interesting project that was emerging some years back https://www.power-technology.com/projects/cornwallwaveenergyhu/ For the "lazy reader" ... tucked away in there is this little nugget written in 2009: It seems that, despite the above, after roughly a decade from the mid 2000's on, technical failures and a growing awareness of development and maintenance costs, water lost out big time to solar and wind. Currently, tidal stream generation has edged ahead of wave and offshore tidal with actual "first farm" devices in place ... as opposed to the well-meaning wave/tidal research community limping along trying to find a way to entice investors with more cost effective ways of generating.
As said, the big energy giants are now too big and powerful and influence government and green energy development. They don't want the World to give up oil and gas for modern alternatives which we know will have to happen eventually. These big firms control our government to the extent that our government are afraid of them. Liz Truss is afraid to face up to them and hit them with a windfall tax. The only way to control our future energy is nationalisation of these companies, as France has done with EDF which France now owns.
So what's Octopus like? Seems I'll be joining you https://www.gov.uk/government/news/...y-providing-certainty-to-15-million-customers
