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The Pentland Firth is a raw, stormy sound between the Scottish mainland and the Orkney Islands, known for some of the world’s fastest flowing marine waters. Daily tides here reach 11 miles per hour, and can go as high as 18 – a breakneck current that’s the reason people are describing Scotland as the Saudi Arabia of tidal power. Now Megan Garber reports in The Atlantic that a new tidal power plant, to be installed off the Scottish coast aims to make Scotland a world leader for turning sea flow into electricity. Underwater windmills, the BBC notes, have the benefit of invisibility—a common objection to wind turbines being how unsightly they are to human eyes. Undersea turbines also benefit from the fact that tides are predictable in ways that winds are not: You know how much power you're generating, basically, on any given day. The tidal currents are also completely carbon-free and since sea water is 832 times denser than air, a 5 knot ocean current has more kinetic energy than a 350 km/h wind.
MeyGen will face a challenge in that work: The turbines are incredibly difficult to install. The Pentland Firth is a harsh environment to begin with; complicating matters is the fact that the turbines can be installed only at the deepest of ocean depths so as not to disrupt the paths of ships on the surface. They also need to be installed in bays or headlands, where tidal flows are at their most intense. It is an unbelievably harsh environment in which to build anything, let alone manage a vast fleet of tidal machines beneath the waves. If each Hammerfest machine delivers its advertised 1MW of power, then you need 1,000 of them to hope to match the output of a typical gas or coal-fired power station. "The real aim," says Keith Anderson, "is to establish the predictability which you get with tidal power, and to feed that into the energy mix which includes the less predictable sources like wind or wave. The whole point of this device is to test that it can produce power, and we believe it can, and to show it's robust and can be maintained."
(Score: 1) by Bill, Shooter Of Bul on Tuesday November 04 2014, @12:04AM
I don't get that. I don't understand that objection. They don't look ugly to me. Now, if they block a view of the grand cannon or what not, that's not good. But that's more to do with what they are blocking than their own asthetics. I mean, the ones around me are in flat farmers fields. If anything, they improve the aesthetics of the area.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 04 2014, @12:58AM
Everybody has an opinion - and as sure as you like them, others will not, and the beauty of the Democratic process is that people who are upset get to voice their opinions. If the population voting on anything is > 100, you can be certain of dissent - good luck even getting 2/3 of people to agree on ANYTHING.
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(Score: 2) by morgauxo on Tuesday November 04 2014, @03:53AM
Unfortunately the ludites have been breeding and they hate the site of anything technological.
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Tuesday November 04 2014, @08:39AM
It's just NIMBYism. People worried about house prices. Farming some now considered pretty, but wind turbines are not.
It boils down to them preferring to have a coal plant built by someone else, rather than some turbines near them.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 04 2014, @10:26AM
Interestingly, old windmills are considered pretty. Although they are nothing but the low-tech version of the same thing.
But maybe they just had the strategy wrong: They should have told the people that it is a modern art project that has the added benefit of generating electricity. :-)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mtrycz on Tuesday November 04 2014, @10:10AM
Just look at those horrendous turbines
http://i.imgur.com/J6oOgqT.jpg [imgur.com]
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