UK could obviously be a wind / wave energy super power. Despite multi-decade mismanagement by government, we can be bullish about UK prospects, especially now Scottish Independence is receding from the conversation
I remember reading a few papers about essentially underwater turbines in tidal estuaries. Where you have natural flow of water that you can just tap. If I recall correctly impact on local wildlife (seals iirc) was lower than expected.
Main argument I could see was that water had 1000x the density of air so 1000x the amount of power for a rotor with the same swept area. Of course fluid speeds are lower so it’s not quite that easy. But much more predictable. They did some fancy optimisations in the blades and came up with decent efficiencies. It’s a great little series of papers by Batten and Bahaj et. al from 2006.
I assume the art has progressed since then.
But yeah, anything with moving parts in seawater is a nightmare as far as I can tell.
Not really, no. Even if you completely solved the issue of corrosion (which we absolutely haven't), you'd still have to deal with biofouling - anything you leave underwater will rapidly become covered in algae, seaweed and invertebrates. We have antifouling coatings, but a) they're quite toxic, for obvious reasons and b) they need to be regularly renewed.
That would be enough of a problem, but you've also got the cost and difficulty of maintaining underwater infrastructure. It's inherently dangerous, very slow and often made impossible by tidal or weather conditions.
Offshore wind turbines are already much more expensive to build and maintain than onshore, but tidal generators are on another level entirely.
The Rance tidal power station [1] in France has been operating since 1966 so I don't think that there are technical issues, at least with this type of tidal power generation (ie. a dam across a tidal estuary and good old turbines to produce electricity). That specific power station doubles as a much needed road bridge, as well.
It wouldn't be legal to build Rance in the EU today, because of the enormously disruptive effects on the local ecosystem. It's not something that bothers me personally, but it's a total dealbreaker in a country like the UK where wildlife activists hold considerably more political sway that climate activists.
There was a project to build a tidal lagoon in Cardiff [1] that was eventually abandoned, and I don't know about the environmental impact. But it had the merit of being ambitious.
It has been operating - but it was a research project and it's not like tidal has proliferated since then. Not quite a dead end yet - people are still working on submerged tidal kinds of things. But close.
That article is based on ridiculous assumptions of future energy consumption growth, and was probably created as a joke. Which backfired since it got seriously quoted in so many places.
In theory if you used the power and radiated it to space (via laser, RF, etc) you’d be ok. You could even use also use that energy to put into rotational energy to increase the earths rotational speed
Sure. And you will transfer no entropy, so this cannot be used to cool the Earth.
SF authors (like David Brin) have screwed up on this very topic.
Lasers can be used for cooling, by shining a laser on a target carefully set up so that anti-Stokes scattering carries away entropy. The light scattered is quite incoherent, though.
You have to be very careful of Maxwell's Demon when it's a question of entropy: how efficient is that laser? How does the efficiency change when it is in a heat bath of X kelvin?
There may be some neat tricks, this is an area I know I'm not good at, but you have to be very careful.
I understand the use of wave in this context like hydrogen fuel cells in NA. It's amazing to hear that our governments are still giving money to what is clearly a bad idea (hydrogen). I think, like in the case of tidal power, you could chalk it up to doing something to sate special interests.
Hydrogen will probably fill a niche for seasonal grid energy storage. In general pumped storage > batteries > hydrogen for cost/efficiency, but hydrogen has the advantage that it's cheap to store for weeks or months at a time while pumped storage/batteries are suited only to smoothing out daily or weekly variations in solar and wind output.
It's more useful for getting from 90%/95% to 100% green energy than from 0% - 90% though, and it's more expensive than natural gas performing the same function so we likely won't see it used in anger for a while.
I disagree. Exactly this post shows much much progress the UK has made. Can you share some specifics of "multi-decade mismanagement by government"? Can you compare that to other highly developed countries?
especially now Scottish Independence is receding from the conversation
Can you explain why this matters? I assume the UK minus Scotland has enough onshore and offshore locations to fully power itself with wind and solar.
UK response to GFC was amongst harshest austerity policies in Europe, leading to infrastructure neglect, local government bankruptcy, degrading of the military and lack of investment in education, healthcare and the rest. This set the scene for Brexit, a policy which increased trade friction with the country's most important trade partners whilst also _increasing_ the immigration it was supposed to reduce.
- Scotland Independence
Indy movement argument for economic viability was access to wind / wave energy around the cost of Scotland. Over half of UK total wind energy comes from Scotland.
Well, yes, Scotland has many of the best sites for wind turbine generation in the UK. In all likelihood my country would be able to sell energy and water to the rest of the UK when Scotland finally leaves (I am still certain it will happen in my lifetime).
But are you then implying that once the UK left the EU, all power transmission wires were cut as well? Because I don't see a reason why England wouldn't still enjoy low prices for wind energy even if Scotland were independent -- if Scotland has overcapacity, they'll have to sell at any price anyway to avoid disrupting their power grid.
Besides, the European electricity grid is much larger than the EU, it spans all the way from Ireland to Turkey, and from Finland to Morocco.
One of the major limitations of wind power in England is that new onshore wind farms are very difficult to construct if not totally illegal in England. This is probably part of the reason for the situation another commenter noticed: most UK offshore is currently in England's territorial waters. But another reason is due to shortfalls in the physical interconnection between the Scottish and English power grids. UK must construct additional pylons.
There's also major potential for wind farms in Wales, although it's been controversial since some of the sites are on top of peat bogs or scenic hills.
>Scotland finally leaves (I am still certain it will happen in my lifetime).
Scotland could aim for a Channel Islands-type arrangement where they still enjoy an economic union without an administrative one. That would be similar to the situation that existed before the Acts of Union. Of course, they're quite a bit bigger than Jersey, so it could be tricky.
Scottish independence is directly linked to energy. If Scottish independence is in the news then the amount of oil in the North Sea vanishes overnight. Luckily it all comes back when independence talk dies down.
UK government pays for energy projects in Scotland to help Scottish economy.
Scotland makes up 7% of UK economy.
Scotland claims 100% ownership after independence.
Genius SNP.
The big wind projects aren't "owned" by the UK/Scottish governments, they are private* assets built under a government license. Most likely an independent Scotland would continue to license these wind farms and the energy trade with the rest of the UK would continue under very similar terms.
* Actually, many of them are owned by non-UK governments.
Isn't it the other way around? British gov sells licenses for windparks for billions. It then guarantees electricity price to a certain degree. This would be presumably paid by the Scottish gov.
