- posted
9 years ago
OT Tidal power
- Vote on answer
- posted
9 years ago
The only renewable energy that I think is worth investing in.
- Vote on answer
- posted
9 years ago
Have any of you driven across that French tidal power station. Forget where is now. I thought that was very impressive, and they even had areas for wildlife etc. Brian
- Vote on answer
- posted
9 years ago
Barrage du Rance, just outside St. Malo. Driven over it, parked in the trees and been inside it. From the viewing gallery I don't remember seeing much - just a clean control room and lots of visitors' posters to read up on its history. Very interesting.
Outside just woods and a quietish country road.
I remember being more excited being inside the Hawswater dam many years ago.
John
- Vote on answer
- posted
9 years ago
The last two paragraphs, referring to a tidal barrage being proposed in the US, worried me slightly. The last sentence includes the phrase "The setup would use pumps to replicate natural tides when necessary...". Sounds suspiciously like perpetual motion to me! OK, so it won't be, but it's not obvious what it does actually mean.
- Vote on answer
- posted
9 years ago
+1
It's entirely predictable and - if spread around the coast - there will always be some significant tide movement *somewhere* for round the clock generation.
- Vote on answer
- posted
9 years ago
tidal-power-wales/
Won't it slow the earth down ;)
- Vote on answer
- posted
9 years ago
One of the many that absolutely are not.
Price/performance is utter shit, its still intermittent and its massively disruptive of marine ecosystems.
In short its got nothing going for it at all.
- Vote on answer
- posted
9 years ago
A site so successful no one ever built another...
- Vote on answer
- posted
9 years ago
Predicatbility is not really helpful
The tidal range on the West is massively more than the east. Ergo it will never be a stable source of power
Its more fairy dust mate. Forget it.
- Vote on answer
- posted
9 years ago
400kW peak.
It's nice, but it would take about 5000 of them to replace those two nukes they just stopped. And another 5000 somewhere else where the tides are out of phase to deal with the slack tide problem.
Andy
- Vote on answer
- posted
9 years ago
Despite the article claiming it is a tidal barrage, if you follow the link to the company's page, it is actually a tidal flow system: effectively underwater versions of windmills. While I would advocate a wholly nuclear solution, if we do have to have renewable energy to keep the greens happy, tidal flow is probably the least intrusive and most predictable.
- Vote on answer
- posted
9 years ago
Which will still leave you with residual ripple.
- Vote on answer
- posted
9 years ago
I hope so because there aren't enough hours in the day.
Bill
- Vote on answer
- posted
9 years ago
The Natural Philosopher wrote hastily:
Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. Lord Kelvin, ca. 1895
There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. Albert Einstein, 1932.
- Vote on answer
- posted
9 years ago
"When a respected and learned scientist says something is possible, he is more than likely right. When a respected and learned scientist says something is impossible he is almost more than likely wrong."
Arthur C Clarke.
- Vote on answer
- posted
9 years ago
"By 20202 the whole country will be running off renewable energy"
A stupid Green
Kelvin should have known better: birds which are heavier then air flying machines already existed. However if he didn't know about the internal combustion engine, he as in fact quite correct. Without the internal combustion engine heavier than air flight was impossible.
There was in 1932 no indication that nuclear energy was ever obtainable and a year or so later every reason as the world tipped towards war, that anyone who thought otherwise be sworn to extreme secrecy.
These were of course NEW technologies. Nothing about wave or tidal poer is new.
The record of the warmists and renewable energy aficionados is so riddled with false claims that there isn't time to list them all.
To put it in simple terms, we know how much energy is in the waves and tides, and we know how much of that we can reasonably extract and we know how much area of sea is needed to get a given amount of energy, and we can calculate a minimum cost for the structures and technologies required to extract it.
All these give minimum costs several times greater than even solar panels and windmills and no possibility without even further costs of massive dimensions of solving the intermittency/dispatch problem.
Neither is there any new technology that might change this.
You can live on dreams if you like. I prefer a bacon sarnie.
The point is that renewable technology is not shiny and new, in fact its centuries old and we abandoned most of it years ago.
Because it didn't work.
And still doesn't.
Sticking titanium shoes on a carthorse is all very well, but it still cant draw a 4,000 tonne train.
A diesel engine can.
- Vote on answer
- posted
9 years ago
I would have thought the best way to harness tidal power is to have a reservoir fill up somehow[1] at high tide, and then use the outflowing water to drive a turbine.
[1]I may have spotted the flaw here ;)- Vote on answer
- posted
9 years ago
I am however an engineer.
And I am not talking about possibilities.
I am talking about cost benefit ratios and environmental impact.
Its POSSIBLE to do many many things that are absolutely not worth doing. Cars with square wheels are possible, with suitable active suspension to keep the car body stable and suitable couplings to prevent longitudinal stresses. Its just a such shit shape for wheel that no one has bothered.
An engineer is someone who can do for five bob what any damned fool can do for a quid, or which a green can't do reliably for 50 quid.
If you want reliable dispatchable power the cheapest way is to burn fossil fuel and the second cheapest is to 'burn' nuclear fuel.
There is no point in doing te rest if your actual aim is to generate cost-effective life giving energy for human consumption.
All the rest is a complete fraud on the public who have to pay for these extravagant cosmic political solutions that fail to solve a problem that is looking increasingly as if it doesn't even exist.
This year, it's more than halfway through the hurricane season and we are up to B for Bertha, and that did f*ck all.
Signs of a cooling globe.
- Vote on answer
- posted
9 years ago
Why not use hydroelectric then? ponds 30 feet above a lower level (which is all you get with tides) could be constructed on many rivers ..
Tides - even Atlantic coast tide = have rotten energy density.
If you have - like the severn - a reasonable geological amplifications, its still marginal, bloody expensive and of deep environtmental impact.
Why bother? One nuke will do far better for far less cost..