British wind will power the UK?s new offshore

Presented purely as an example of a "location with potential".

Forty years ago, they were supposed to be "doing computer simulations" and you would see artists concepts of structures placed across the entire bay (ideas that stretched credulity). But we never did hear about how those simulations turned out. There may also have been wave tank modeling done, a scale model of the bottom made up and tidal waters run in it (because they did stuff like that, back then).

Current attempts to harness some of that water, are quite small and muted efforts (handful of megawatts) and don't involve building barriers. This may be an attempt to generate some power, without huge capital cost. The firm doing the work, may have been attempting to build a device, where the capital cost would be competitive with a wind setup. (Drop 2MW device on the bottom, generate somewhat less, multiple times per day.)

But at least if you were asking "is it worthwhile", 8000 train engines worth of electricity would make an appreciable contribution to that particular area. You could shut down some of the dirty baseline generation devices for a couple hours here and there, if it could all be harnessed. That area only has one nuke, but a land-based hydro project should be coming online soon, to add to the basket of power for those people. The land based project was hugely over budget, and a planning disaster from A to Z (the people living there, will be paying a tax on their lekky bills forever because of that mistake).

But they're running out of rivers to dam here, so the search to find moar power continues. The BEV cars the people can't afford, will need to be charged.

Paul

It really puzzles me that all these renewable advocates want to build multiple installations just to get the output of a single nuke or modern gas-fired station.

They want one station for the price of two. Perhaps I could interest them in my portfolio of bridges.

Of course it just, just in the same way you are puzzled why anyone would eat plant based foods when there are animals being bred to be killed and eaten?

eg, No consideration of the what if's which *ARE* very big in the case of nuclear, even if the likelihood is very very small.

And as for burning the remaining fossil fuels ...

Whoosh.

And if you sell them, what will you live under?

Cheers, T i m

Except the tidal range varies from 30 ft or more in the west to only about 10 ft in the NE and there aren't that many sane places for a barrage

IIRC there is only one very small tidal power staton on the UK.

I wonder why

No,they dont BUT the efficiency until about 45 minutes from warm start is not very good

Remember a CCGT is a jet engine driving a turbine with a steam turbine using the hot exhaust. From reasonably not totally cold like any jet engine they are capable of delivering useful power after 5-10 minutes but at around 40% efficiency: then as the steam circuit comes on line -

'the wind is always blowing somewhere'

Its an art student thing, No NUMBERS involved. Just hand wavey GreenCrap

Too hard for us Art Students.

While I accept your comment that the Bay of Fundy is no more than a 'location with potential', the tidal power station there is really tiny, despite it being listed as the third largest tidal power plant in the world in 2016 (or was in 2016), see the Tinyurl in the other branch of this thread, repeated here

I'm sure that there are plenty of other 'locations with potential' as you put it. The Severn estuary is often talked about, and then dismissed; I expect the Dardanelles would be good, and even the Straits of Gibraltar was seriously considered at one time

The late David Mackay discussed the tidal power available to the UK from the rise and fall of the Atlantic in the Western Approaches

It's possible the 20MW one, is shore based.

What they're working on here, is submersible devices. One is a metal wreck on the bottom right now, and a contract will be let at some point, to remove it and cut it up. The idea behind small devices, is to see if they can get the material cost of a "micro" solution down to the point, it can be deployed like wind. There have been no details of the innards, because of the fear of a competitor reproducing whatever passes for "innovation".

There was another one, but I don't know what became of that.

And these items rusting on the bottom, are less than 20MW.

And one of the companies went bankrupt, so wasn't capitalized well enough for the job.

I don't think these are government backed, and are just as much science experiments as anything else. Because the one that broke, I guess it couldn't take the stresses.

It's like all these fantasies about living on the ocean bottom. Not gunna happen.

It's too bad I never got to see the research results, whether the "giant" version, putting a dam across the whole thing, whether that was even possible without collateral damage. They don't seem to draw pictures like that any more and maybe there's a reason why.

As for building nukes, some financial collapses have scared the s*it out of government. And it's hard to have the bottomless well of cash, to be able to write generous contracts to assure the contractor they won't be stuck on the hook for cost overruns. Everybody knows these things will overrun, and somehow that has to be capped.

Even our last hydro project (we have experience doing those), the wrong people were running the show, and the final price ended up higher than anyone could possibly imagine. It will take a long time before the electricity generated, will pay for itself. It was a case of liars poker - they had to keep throwing in money, so that the existing investment would not be a loss. There really weren't any good choices to make at that point.

I'm all in favor of nukes, but I don't think anyone has the will to do that any more. It's just too hard to craft a contract that all parties can sign.

And the existence of SMR proposals, is a kind of "evidence of defeat". Maybe some will get built, but not enough to make a difference. We'll be building those out of boredom, instead of with a purpose. Doing a couple of those will be virtue signaling.

Power is hard. And takes a lot of concrete.

Paul

It seems to be something to do with a system called a 'balanced diet', which the human digestive tract and metabolism had developed to cope with.

Not eating such a diet can lead to mental instability and neurological damage, and even the factory-made frankenfoods developed to look and taste like meat so that plant-eaters can pretend to enjoy them, don't supply the missing ingredients of a proper diet.

This may be of interest to you:

The Pentland Firth scheme, operated by Meygen, seems to be doing OK after some early teething problems. The plan is to put in place a total of about 55 turbines of about 1.5MW capacity each, to give a total output of 86MW. The full turbine array is supposed to be complete by the end of this year.

While I accept it's still early days in exploiting the Pentland Firth tidal flows, and indeed others in the general area around the Orkney Isles, 86MW isn't very much in the grand scheme of things.

Other Pentland Firth stuff here, which I've not read in any detail.

You?d think that the mouth of Strangford Lough would be a super spot for this kind of thing? Surely they could make it work there?

Tim

We visited Strangford Lough in 2016. There was an experimental generator under the water then. I think it was Belfast Uni that it belonged to.

That's not the issue. That's easy.

The problem is finding sites that (a) give enough power to make a real difference (b) don't wreck large areas of the environment.

Andy

No it's not!

I did say 'similar and substantial'.

So essentially it's another 'if we could find a place where the wind blew steadily every day of the year, less than 500 miles from Birmingham'

except we cant....