July 2025: Wind not doing very well

Only after the people in the mnistry and the chief scientific ossifer had told him it was all bollox and he couldnt have what he wanted

I heard it through a grapevine, I am interested in these matters

Oxford educated too. You'd think if an elite university education taught you anything it would be to read around a topic before you form an opinion. Much less try and enact that opinion using public money.

Maybe they heard about their "100% renewables" thesis in much the same way, through a grapevine, and took it at face value. They certainly didn't get it from a credible source.

I suppose at least you restrict your ramblings to a NG. If they'd acted on their new facts and closed down all non-renewables, we'd be in a right pickle.

Tidal is pretty reliable. Admittedly there are variations like spring and neap tides, but there is still a tidal range between high and low tide everywhere around the coast.

The main obstacle so far has been damage to the existing ecosystems rather than the ability to harness the tides.

the French found corrosion a problem.

No, its merely predictably unreliable

Which isn't any help.

Salter Ducks broke up in storms. Some saw the huge tidal range of the Bristol Channel and thought of a barrage, plus navigation access, across the whole width of the Channel. But they had not figured that you no longer got that huge tidal range.

Yes. If you start with a resonant system which creates very large tides and extract energy from it in useful amounts the resonance is damped and the tidal range becomes much less. John

Well, it *can* certainly help.

There is a recurring theme or undertone to tidal projects. You can spot that in the text here.

In the Bay of Fundy, an engineering firm lowered a submersible generator onto the bottom. I guess the idea is, it would harvest energy from water passing by, without "damming up" the waters to improve the power output. The project lasted around two days, before the Bay of Fundy broke it :-)

And this is why, if I see any credible plan to spend billions on a really large tidal project, there are just so many ways it can lead to ruination. The smaller projects in the above article, make a lot more sense -- not ambitious, but more likely to last for a while.

Every project counts, and if you can make 50MW here, 200MW there, it's all for a good cause. Just don't expect to be replacing reactors with it.

If we dammed the entire Bay of Fundy, it *could* replace reactors. You can see estimates for 16GW if partially dammed, and a theoretical 48GW if fully dammed. But fortunately, that's never going to happen. It's not ecology that would stop it, but capital cost is just too high. And there is a large risk it would fall over before it was finished. It's not like a hydro project on a fresh water river.

I have no idea how the grid management would work for that. How would you handle a 16GW device coming online multiple times a day ? That's sixteen reactors-worth. I suppose the turbines would be brought online, one by one. It's still a lump of power to be managing.

Paul

"If ma Da' had t*ts he'd be ma Ma'" :)

I wouldnt trust wikipedia on renewable energy. Both sun and wind are equally as predictable 12 hours ahead.

It doesn't help. You still need to fill in the gaps.

Tide changes an hour(ish) every day and is just another intermittent source.

It needs an adequate difference in height between high and low tides. Ideally don't select an area with shifting sands or in places with a high silt content.

it worked so well for the French that they never prepared the experiment.

ITYM 'repeated'

I dont know why so many not entirely uneducated people go bananas over coming up with every solution for energy that has been tried and found wanting, and refuse to countenance the one alternative that demonstrably works.

Because there's money in conning the entirely uneducated. (Nothing has changed).

If I cared more about my bank balance than the fate of the planet*, I too would be furiously plugging EVs, Solar panels, Windmills and any other way of getting my hands on taxpayers money in the form of a subsidy.

Yebbut tides happen at different places at different times so more than one tidal station fills the gaps.

Most, if not all, tidal power schemes only operate for 12 hours per day. For 3 hours either side of peak high and peak low tides, the water flow isn't sufficient to generate enough power to be worth the effort. So you need another reliable source of power to fill the gaps, nuclear being the obvious choice. But if you're going to run your nuclear plants for 12 hours per day, you might as well run them 24 hours per day and forget the tidal stuff completely.

As you imply, all renewable generation falls into the unreliable category, never reliably available when you need it.

Where would you put them in the UK, for example, and have you done the calculations to demonstrate that those (very few) sites can supply all the electricity needed? Of course you haven't!

The clue to the current state of renewable energy generation finance in the country lies in this sentence in the Wikipedia article referenced:

Who wants to invest with that time-scale of payback?

It’s why we have renewable subsidies and a wheeze called Contract for Difference, which is roughly the equivalent of being robbed of £100 and being given back a tenner by the robber.