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Tidal Lagoon: £1.3bn Swansea Bay Project Backed by Review

posted by martyb on Sunday January 15 2017, @06:31AM   
from the sounds-fishy dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

The BBC reports:

Plans for a £1.3bn tidal lagoon in Swansea Bay have been backed by a government-commissioned review.

Charles Hendry's independent report into the technology's viability said it would make a "strong contribution" to the UK's energy supply.

He said it was cost effective and would bring "significant economic opportunity".

The UK government still needs to agree on a deal and a marine licence would also need to be approved.

Mr Hendry said moving ahead with a pathfinder lagoon off the Swansea coast should be seen as a "no regrets" policy.

There are hopes of developing a network of larger lagoons around the UK coast, harnessing power from the ebb and flow of the sea's tides.

Tidal power sounds promising on paper, but does it still make sense in an era when the cost of solar and wind are dropping quickly?

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Original Submission

• Consistency Consistency (Score: 5, Insightful) by Adrian Harvey on Sunday January 15 2017, @07:44AM

  by Adrian Harvey (222) on Sunday January 15 2017, @07:44AM (#454039)

  Tidal power has one great advantage over other forms of renewable power in that it is consistent and predictable - day in day out - and not affected by the weather. Among renewables it is exceeded only by Geothermal in this respect. And there's not a lot of potential for Geothermsl in the UK

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• Re:Consistency (Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday January 15 2017, @11:00AM

  by Unixnut (5779) on Sunday January 15 2017, @11:00AM (#454049)

  There is another apart from geothermal: Hydroelectric.

  However that requires suitable formations for best use, although the UK does have some big Hydro plants, most of them have been mini and micro hydro plants, primarily converting old watermills to generate electricity.

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• Re:Consistency Re:Consistency (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15 2017, @07:40PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 15 2017, @07:40PM (#454142)

  Do you want the moon yo crash into the earth? Cause this is how you do it!!!! Suck all that orbital energy out! Damn hippies, this is why coal and oil are safer...

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  • Re:Consistency (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday January 16 2017, @01:58AM

    by c0lo (156) on Monday January 16 2017, @01:58AM (#454226) Journal

    Do you want the moon yo crash into the earth?

    Due to tides, the Moon actually recedes from Earth. [wikipedia.org]. At the best you can accuse them of wanting to... ahem... boost the economy by getting to a month-long working day sooner (than 4.5 billion years).

    The mass of the Moon is sufficiently large, and it is sufficiently close, to raise tides in the matter of Earth. In particular, the water of the oceans bulges out towards and away from the Moon. The average tidal bulge is synchronized with the Moon's orbit, and Earth rotates under this tidal bulge in just over a day. However, Earth's rotation drags the position of the tidal bulge ahead of the position directly under the Moon. As a consequence, there exists a substantial amount of mass in the bulge that is offset from the line through the centers of Earth and the Moon. Because of this offset, a portion of the gravitational pull between Earth's tidal bulges and the Moon is not perpendicular to the Earth–Moon line, i.e. there exists a torque between Earth and the Moon. This boosts the Moon in its orbit, and slows the rotation of Earth.
    ...
    If other effects were ignored, tidal acceleration would continue until the rotational period of Earth matched the orbital period of the Moon. At that time, the Moon would always be overhead of a single fixed place on Earth.

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford

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