Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by LaminatorX on Monday November 03 2014, @11:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the plowing-the-sea dept.

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."

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Tuesday November 04 2014, @07:14AM

    by deimtee (3272) on Tuesday November 04 2014, @07:14AM (#112881) Journal
    Assuming that each space represents a fixed amount of energy generation, and each # a set amount of carbon then the argument goes something like :

    Coal fired plant:
    #####--#--#--#--#--#--#--#--#--#--#--#--#--#--#--#--#--#--####
    Total (26x #, 36x -)

    Carbon free power generation of equal capacity:
    ##################--------------------------------############
    Total (30x #, 32x -)

    Numbers are for illustration only, but it is easily possible that a zero carbon power plant is worse than a fossil fuel plant.
    Renewable plants can also entail more quick start-up load balancing plants and/or the costs of using power at non-optimal times.
    Relative maintenance costs may also factor in to it.
    I am in favour of renewables, but they need to be based on valid engineering, not handwavey statements like yours.
    --
    If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 04 2014, @02:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 04 2014, @02:06PM (#112950)

    F#c#i#g M#r#n