World's First Lagoon Power Plants Unveiled In UK 197
AmiMoJo writes Plans to generate electricity from the world's first series of tidal lagoons have been unveiled in the UK. The six lagoons — four in Wales and one each in Somerset and Cumbria — will capture incoming and outgoing tides behind giant sea walls, and use the weight of the water to power turbines. The series of six lagoons could generate 8% of the UK's electricity for an investment of £12bn. Tidal Lagoon Power wants £168 per MWh hour for electricity in Swansea, reducing to £90-£95 per MWh for power from a second, more efficient lagoon in Cardiff. The £90 figure compares favorably with the £92.50 price for power from the planned Hinkley nuclear station, especially as the lagoon is designed to last 120 years — at a much lower risk than nuclear. Unlike power from the sun and wind, tidal power is predictable. Turbines capture energy from two incoming and two outgoing tides a day, and are expected to be active for an average of 14 hours a day. Friends of the Earth Cymru, said the group is broadly in favor of the Swansea lagoon.
Fuckers! (Score:4, Funny)
Any energy source that does not burn fossil fuels is for pinko commies, and the people designing and building them should immediately be taken out and shot! We must only use oil, coal and natural gas, and we should have a law that allows for summary execution of anyone who brings up wind, solar, AGW, or science. After all, we know God fucking hates greenies and wants us to kill all of them!
Fuck everyone who believes spewing CO2 into the atmosphere isn't a good, nay, incredibly great and healthy thing! We should kill all the climatologists right fucking now!!!!!
I'd say more, but I'm at risk of drowning in my own spittle.
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As sarcasm goes, this is pretty crude and clumsy.
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But all too sadly a really rather accurate portrayal, of the Fox not-News fossil fuelers.
Of course the nuclear mobs are raising the heads and they are the natural enemy of the fossil fuelers. Kill fossil fuel and nuclear investments will basically go 'nuclear' sic. (mining and energy generation). Not to forget certain countries will gain hugely whilst other countries will suffer enormously and for a very few it is a swap from one revenue source to another ie the US would become energy independent, Canada
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As sarcasm goes, this is pretty crude and clumsy.
I found it pretty hard to distinguish from many serious posts here on slashdot, "pinko" being the only slightly jarring note (presumably put in deliberately as a wink), as right wingers seem to just use "liberal" nowadays as their all-purpose insult.
A giant lagoon dam (Score:2)
And dams aren't really worth it either (Score:2, Insightful)
So there'll be lots of hidden costs, like how 90 UKP per MWh is apparently the cheapest of the six things, if everything goes as planned. If not, well... budget overruns are not uncommon in large projects, are they? So with a lot of handwaving we might find that the price overall is really some thirty to forty percent higher than nuclear.
And with modern nuclear reactors, preferrably of the "fail-safe" type (As in doesn't need 'leccy to cool for days when you're trying to shut it off; while at it plan for so
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Tidal power would seem to have a lot going for it, but there's probably a good reason that it hasn't taken off before now. Of course, that reason may have been solved...
For that matter, cost overruns are also likely on large nuclear plant projects. (Every one I've heard about has had a significant cost overrun, of course there's a huge selection bias...)
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The reasons are simple: high capital costs, the requirement for a big tidal range and cheap fossil fuels.
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Yes, but to be fair the people with concern about fish spawning sites seem to be entirely the angling community.
Now, as much as I respect their enjoyment of the sport, I'm not overly convinced that "Don't do that project, it might kill fish and we want to kill them instead" is really the greatest argument not to do something.
Let's be honest, if even the environmentalist, commercial, and political lobbies are all on side then this is about as good as it gets in terms of agreement. Those anglers are just goin
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The only hobby fishermen I know go to rivers or lakes.
I really can't see it as much of an issue.
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Well from what I can tell they seem to be complaining about this impacting fish moving upstream from the sea (I wasn't even under the impression many fish even do this given that most either stick to either salt water or fresh water- the species that move between are I believe incredibly small in number).
I'm having a hard time too seeing how this will have any real impact. That's why I get the impression that the supposed anglers are just a bunch of nimbys making up an excuse for the hell of it because chan
Re: A giant lagoon dam (Score:2, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_barrage suggests fish mortality is quite high with this method. Considering estuaries are typically fish breeding grounds, If the alternative wasn't nuclear I'd say it wasn't worth the risk to an already depleted ecosystem.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_barrage suggests fish mortality is quite high with this method. Considering estuaries are typically fish breeding grounds, If the alternative wasn't nuclear I'd say it wasn't worth the risk to an already depleted ecosystem.
There are a very limited number of places on earth where tidal dam power works. Power output scales linearly with height difference. This map [geoscienceworld.org] shows the tidal range all over the world. Combine that with a need for a bay or inlet that can be dammed without impacting commerce or the environment, and the list of places tidal power can be used shrinks dramatically. Remember, you need a bay or cove that is large enough to be worthwhile for making power, but not so large that it is economically important. And
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Nothing wrong with a little tidal power but just looking at the geography it will never be a significant source of power.
Another problem is the cost. The prices listed in the summary are very expensive electricity ... and those are the lowball figures used to get the project approved, not the "real" numbers. Offshore wind would be cheaper, and have far less environmental impact.
Re: A giant lagoon dam (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing wrong with a little tidal power but just looking at the geography it will never be a significant source of power.
Another problem is the cost. The prices listed in the summary are very expensive electricity ... and those are the lowball figures used to get the project approved, not the "real" numbers. Offshore wind would be cheaper, and have far less environmental impact.
As an traditional power plant engineer, offshore wind costs seem staggeringly high to me. A 90m (300ft) tall tower in the middle of the ocean supporting a nacelle that weighs about 520 metric tons (1.15 million pounds) doesn't come cheap. Have you seen rate sheets for the cranes that are needed to assemble these turbines? On land, they average in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per day.
At sea, with the need for a large vessel and all the crew that a large vessel requires to keep it operating, the cost is staggering. I spent a couple weeks aboard the Tolteca [marinetraffic.com], a Mexican heavy-lift ship with a 2000 ton crane and a crew of about 250. Even using labor from the developing world, the costs are astronomical. We invoiced them millions of dollars of work and they didn't even blink. An offshore supply boat rents out (in good oil-boom times, maybe not right now) for hundreds of thousands of dollars per day. A heavy crane ship is probably in the millions per day. That's just for erecting the wind turbine, which is probably at least a 24 hour lift. You also need specialized vessels to lay high voltage cable across the sea floor. Adding "marine" or "offshore" to the name of anything is an excellent way to multiply the cost by at least 3.
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Probably true but like you said, there is already a huge power industry that uses offshore infrastructure ubiquitously. The 12B pounds probably takes at least some of those costs into consideration.
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Better negotiate the contract during a Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn / Framsóknarflokkurinn (conservative) government. Samfylkingin would approve it under the condition that the Icelandic government's share of the sales are so high that you would barely save any money on the imported power, and Vinstri Grænir would outright reject it no matter what you offered. But Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn and Framsóknarflokkurinn would let you dam up whatever rivers you want and take gigaw
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I'm sorry, but I agree with that. If you on the UK want us to dam up our rivers and build roads out to geothermal areas and tap into our resources, and raise our local power prices in the process, all for the benefit of the UK, our government better damn well profit as much as possible from it and reduce our taxes / improve our services in exchange for that.
Unfortunately, xB and xD do not agree.
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Yes, but around Swansea, and in the Bristol Channel, the tidal range is around 4-5m -- that's the second highest tidal range in the world. The channel is around over a km across and many km long. That's an awful lot of water. If a barrier were placed across the channel, it would produce something like 25% of the energy requirements of the UK. Even these lagoons are likely to produce a significant percentage of demand. Pretty significant as far as I can see.
Of course, this may not be so significant on a glob
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I'm not sure why the aren't building the tidal pools on land anyways. Find low lands, dredge it, run a pipe iut into the ocean and build condos around new lagoon.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_barrage suggests fish mortality is quite high with this method. Considering estuaries are typically fish breeding grounds, If the alternative wasn't nuclear I'd say it wasn't worth the risk to an already depleted ecosystem.
If we were that worried about fish, we could always stop eating so many of them.
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You could find fans for a plan like that... [conspirazzi.com]
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http://www.textfiles.com/sex/E... [textfiles.com]
Are dolphins fish,
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screamingly obvious answers to non-problems.
The problem with screamingly obvious answers is the may be obvious but wrong. Wire mesh over turbines are nice, but what do you do if sea life grows on them blocking intakes? Chlorine shock the water to kill growth? Any solution has pluses and minuses and to minimize the negative is a long run mistake.
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Readily replaceable intakes?
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Armegeddon for indigenous marine life. (Score:2, Interesting)
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This is a horrible, horrible idea. It will reek havoc with the existing natural tidal currents and completely change the ecosystems and natural patterns present in this tidal lagoons. Many of these species are already under heavy pressure from human activities and this could be the nail in the coffin, so to speak. Do these idiots even think before they plan these things? It's like they put ecological destruction primary in their considerations and then power production secondary. Hopefully these can be easily taken out with a boat and a proper load of high explosives.
I don't see how this project is more harmful to local wildlife than let's said a huge international seaport. Moreover, I'm quite sure it's actually helping wildlife in a global basis if we take into account most of the power production of the UK come from fossils fuel.
Sadly, this isn't a tech that many country can use since you need huge tide. (see this map : http://www6.cityu.edu.hk/see_m... [cityu.edu.hk])
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You don't need a huge tide, that just makes it more efficient, and cheaper to build, and requiring less land and construction. So perhaps it's only feasible in a few places, but any country with a coast on the Atlantic, the Pacific, or the Indian Oceans should be able to make it work with enough effort and expense. Most of them just wouldnt' find it practical.
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a) We will always need power. b) We will run out of fossil fuel reserves. c)Generation by wind and s0lar means alone cannot provide reliable grid electricity as the World has come to appreciate it, and d)there is little public appetite for nuclear generation.
Storage technology and the resistance of equipment to decay in harsh sea climes are two factors likely to be improved by
Re:Armegeddon for indigenous marine life. (Score:5, Insightful)
Bonus points: it wont flood any place in land that is not actually flooded twice a day, it won't send more carbon into the air, will not release any radioactive isotopes, does not need a lot of rare metals, will not increase temperature.
Re:Armegeddon for indigenous marine life. (Score:5, Insightful)
The USA has thousands of miles of coastline too. Alas, salmon were only interested in a tiny fraction of those thousands, and the dams built on that tiny fraction were a major problem for salmon.
So, what's going to be the problem fish/crustacean/whatever for these installations?
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Still, as you point out, the coastline numbers are quite large. See How long is the UK coastline? [cartography.org.uk] for details. The figure for the UK is given as about 19,491 miles (31,368 km). That said, this figure also include all the islands, so isn't just the mainland.
But it WILL dry some of them out... (Score:3)
Bonus points: it wont flood any place in land that is not actually flooded twice a day,
But, by retarding the tidal current, it WILL dry out part of the area currently intermittently wetted, and WILL keep continuously wet another part of it that is currently intermittently dried.
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So they're going to ring around the country twice?
(JUST KIDDING -- , vs . attempt at joke)
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The nuclear huggers are aware of the fact that there aren't all that many places around the world where you can build such a thing (if you want it to be efficient, and/or the costs per kWh to not be astronomical).
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You people who can't write English are so funny.
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This is a horrible, horrible idea. It will reek havoc with the existing natural tidal currents and completely change the ecosystems and natural patterns present in this tidal lagoons. Many of these species are already under heavy pressure from human activities and this could be the nail in the coffin, so to speak. Do these idiots even think before they plan these things? It's like they put ecological destruction primary in their considerations and then power production secondary. Hopefully these can be easily taken out with a boat and a proper load of high explosives.
This isn't nuclear or fossil fuel based. Therefore, it cannot possibly be a threat to any ecosystem. Haven't you learned anything in the past 10 years?
Just look at "birdmageddon" caused by wind turbines. It's like ethnic cleansing but no one's been accused of war crimes. All you can hear is the sinister whooshing of turbines and the cries of newly hatched chicks mourning for their slaughtered mothers.
Thank god the fossil fuel industry is there to try to give those helpless innocents a voice.
Storage (Score:5, Insightful)
While tides are predictable that are also predictably different than electricity demand curves. Storage is still needed to shift production to meet demand. Predictability is not dispatchability. Add the cost of storage need to shift production to demand and the cost is much higher.
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As far as reliability (having it when you need it), which is certainly different than predictability (knowing when it will be available), they could theoretically back up the supply and allow lower flow at times, faster at others, but this would increase the dam effect that environmentalists are worried about.
Its too big a project/risk, I doubt it ever h
Can scale back fossil fuel based generation ... (Score:4, Insightful)
While tides are predictable that are also predictably different than electricity demand curves. Storage is still needed to shift production to meet demand. Predictability is not dispatchability. Add the cost of storage need to shift production to demand and the cost is much higher.
Its not that simple. Tidal generation can also be used to temporarily reduce fossil fuel based generation. Throttle down the fossil fuel based plants during tidal generation, it predictable and schedule-able after all. Power generation can remain constant yet less fossil fuels are used.
Re:Can scale back fossil fuel based generation ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Only if the change is enough to "throttle down" base load plants.
BTW base load plants are not very efficient at partial load.
This will probably shift more load to peaking plants. Over all you should see a reduction of fossil fuel use but not one to one relation. Not to mention the environmental impact of this.
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Peaking plants are a prime target for battery storage.. energy supplied by renewable energy. :-)
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"Not to mention the environmental impact of this."
Which is?
There's a reason the environmentalists are broadly on side on this one. The reef effect means this is like a newly created marine reserve area and a power plant all rolled into one.
Personally my only real concern with this is that which is coupled with wind power - we seem to be putting more and more of our power generation out to sea. That makes it far more vulnerable to sabotage, and far easier to sabotage. If we ever ended up at war, or if terror
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The station produces electricity 14 hours a day. That means in each six hour cycle the station produces power for 3.5 hours. That means one would have to ramp up and down conventional power plants four timed a day to compensate. Ramping up and down cost energy in the form of extra burning to ramp up and extra cooling to ramp down. Lets burn extra fuel to use green energy.
Please note that tidal is usually ramping up or down and is stable.only for very few minutes each cycle.
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Re:Storage (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmm, 14 hour uptime per 24 hours and change. Which means up for seven hours, down for 5.3 (or so) hours, up for seven hours, down for 5.3 (or so) hours.
First off, you can't shut down a coal power plant and restart it in only five hours. And it will operate at considerably (for values of "considerably" that vary from 10% to 30%) reduced efficiency for some hours after startup
Secondly, pollution from coal plants are 30%-50% (or so, depending on type of pollutant) higher during the 24 (or so) hours immediately after startup.
Which means that you're basically reducing efficiency of your coal plant in exchange for getting more pollution out of it.
In other words, that won't work.
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The grid is bigger than one coal plant. They want to build a few of these, and they can control the timing somewhat by delaying the release of water for a few hours.
Demand and supply already varies by more than these lagoons will provide over the course of a few hours. Somehow the grid copes with it. It's a solved problem.
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Yep. It's solved with CTs (Combustion Turbines). Basically jet engines hooked to generators. The lowest efficiency power plants still running.
They used to be able to ramp with hydro, but that's now very limited. You simply can't put walls of water down rivers on a daily basis. The only hydro that still ramps without control are dams that cascade right into another lake.
BTW these tidal generators already have very little head (not /. 'very little hea
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Gas turbines these days are getting close to 40% efficiency, and close to 60% if you put them in combined cycle (where you use the exhaust heat to boil water to run a steam turbine).
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They want to build a few of these, and they can control the timing somewhat by delaying the release of water for a few hours.
There are 4 peaks in the day that produce power; two high tides and two low tides. Generating for 14 hours a day means that in each cycle electricity is produced for 3.5 hours. If you delay production by 3.5 hours the water level is the as it was 3.5 hours earlier and electricity can not be produced.
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"First off, you can't shut down a coal power plant and restart it in only five hours. And it will operate at considerably (for values of "considerably" that vary from 10% to 30%) reduced efficiency for some hours after startup"
Why assume we only have one coal plant to handle this in the UK? If you stagger it across plants your point becomes irrelevant. We have a national grid for a reason.
"Secondly, pollution from coal plants are 30%-50% (or so, depending on type of pollutant) higher during the 24 (or so) h
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"Because many of these actual professionals just want the investment money so they can line their pockets."
That's just conspiracy theory though. If it's true then how do we ever get anything done ever? If everyone is just making stuff up for money then why is the world not in tatters? If your suggestion is that this industry is more prone to this, then I'd love to see some evidence for it.
Most likely engineers in this field are like engineers in every field and they do it because they enjoy solving problems
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Why the fuck do so many people on Slashdot think they're smarter than the actual professionals who create these designs for a living and have already thought through and solved all these problems?
Because many of these actual professionals just want the investment money so they can line their pockets.
As opposed to those in favour of nuclear, coal or whatever who all work pro bono for the good of humanity?
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First off, you can't shut down a coal power plant and restart it in only five hours.
You really need to know hoe power plants work before posting. A conventional thermal plant does not "shut down" to reduce power. It will slack off stoking the boilers but will stay at operation temperature. In effect the energy that should have been converted to electricity during tidal production will just be dumped as waste heat.
It is still bad but for a different reason.
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Ah, but the principle is that the lagoon is filled by the moon (spinning those turbines as it floods in) and then they put down gates to keep the water in, releasing it when the tide has turned. The tides are every 6 hours, so you get a lot of generation during that time - it may not be continuous 24/7 but you get it between 4pm and 10pm, so we would get a lot during the evening when the sun has set and solar is no longer producing. They say generation will be 14 hours a day,
Sure, we still need storage thou
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Some days you do, some you don't. Tides happen at about 12 hour and 40 minute intervals. So the period that you have tidal power drifts around the clock over a lunar month....
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Well, I don't know what they're planning, but ISTM that if they divide the storage area they can greatly extend the time at which they're generating energy in exchange for nearly halving the peak generation capability...and without much pumping (which adds an additional inefficiency or three).
OTOH, the amount of energy that can be generated by water stored at a particular height depends on the fall distance. So the potential generation capability will vary a lot as the tide changes. Maybe some of the infl
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it may not be continuous 24/7 but you get it between 4pm and 10pm,
Tides run on a 24 hours and 50 minutes cycle. Each day the highs and lows get an hour later. Also there are 4 cycles which means the plant produces for 3.5 hours each cycle which makes producing from 4PM to 10PM impossible.
I vote to re-use all the old gas meters we have kicking around for the task!
Gas meters are not high volume pumps. That was funny. The other issue is that only a few places are viable to use as pumped storage.
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the principle is that the lagoon is filled by the moon
Now that's just crazy talk.
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Indeed, with the right sort of chambers and locking, you can use these lagoons not only for tidal generation but as storage pools for wind and solar power, without the environmental impact of damming up every large valley you can find on land...
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Actually, they will have some ability to decide when to generate the power. For example, if none is needed at the start of high tide they can close the gates. Then as demand grows they can open them wide. Presuming sufficiently large gates, they could do that and still capture maximum power for that cycle.
Same holds true as the tide goes out.
Since the energy input is free and never ending, they just need to do a cost/benefit analysis. If the storage is more expensive than the potential energy gains, they ca
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There are 4 cycles that generate electricity 2 high tides and 2 low tides. From the summary they can generate electricity for about 14 hours a day that means that within each 6 hour cycle the generate power for 3.5 hours. Which means that it is 1.5 hours of rising production and 1.5 declining production. Basically if you need to shift production by 2 hours you lose the cycle.
they just need to do a cost/benefit analysis.
Lose enough cycles and the benefit is outweighed by the cost.
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It's 'use it or lose it'.
What price is acceptable? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have some detailed knowledge of this project which has been in planning and is approaching potential planning approval in the next few months. Clearly this news announcement is a late push by their PR function.
I have seen the predicted costs of the Swansea bay development rise from £600M to £1000M in the space of two years, hence the exorbitant guaranteed MWh price the developers are seeking. Bear in mind that the functional generating equipment has a design lifespan of around 30 years therefore in the lagoon's predicted lifespan this kit would need to be changed out in it's entirety multiple times, accruing further major operating costs. But no matter, the end user will pay by virtue of the mechanism set up by the UK government.
As its generation is governed by the tides a large proportion of the time it's effective output will be out of the premium workday window and effectively wasted generation.
The further claim that newer lagoon developments would require lower guaranteed MWh price closer to nukes by virtue of improved efficiency is quite frankly nonsense.
No matter how you look at these, they represent very poor value for money for the consumer.
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"Bear in mind that the functional generating equipment has a design lifespan of around 30 years therefore in the lagoon's predicted lifespan this kit would need to be changed out in it's entirety multiple times, accruing further major operating costs."
Without a dramatic improvement in materials science maintenance will be a huge cost. Ship propellers suffer from the hostile chemical environment of the sea--do planners think that these turbines will be made of some magical material that can do better?
It mig
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If you want to find corruption in government funded projects, look to HS2.
It's going to cost 1.5 times as much to build a 300 mile railway and buy a handful of trains as it did to wage every aspect of a 13 year war in Afghanistan performed by UK forces including every soldier transported to and from, every bullet fired, every bomb dropped, every aircraft sortie flown, the running of a base the size of the entire city of Reading in the UK for the entire time, every soldier fed, every firebase built, every ro
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How many large power plants built since the 60's have been on-budget? 1st world only need apply, please.
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An anonymous coward making an appeal to authority. How does this still work?
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DANGER! Longer days, throw out the moon! (Score:2, Funny)
This is SOOO inconsiderate! Harvesting tidal power will SLOW the rotation of the Earth, making days longer, and simultaneously accelerate the moon, so it will recede from us more quickly!
BAN TIDAL POWER HARVESTING NOW!
(Who want's longer Mondays?)
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I don't think the energy fraction for even 100% demand satisfaction can be measured. It'll be below the noise floor for even a quantum processor.
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The moon was going to move all that water anyway, and just turn it to heat due to friction.
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this is going to go the same way as the Bristol Tidal Barrage. That thing was a month away from construction starting, that was just a bunch of anchored floats. Know what stopped it?
Some fucking retard claiming that it would kill the surf!
First Ever? (Score:2)
First ever tidal power lagoon?
Prior art: http://boston1775.blogspot.com... [blogspot.com]
FOE is in favor: Yeah, right! (Score:2)
Greens love any renewable energy project that doesn't exist yet, but you can bet that as soon as construction actually begins on this thing, they will find a reason to oppose it every step of the way. How difficult can it actually be to filter out the fish from the inrushing water? Do this for the rising tide cycle, and the descending-tide cycle is already taken care of.
Such a deal, too: if UK users will put up with paying GBP 168/KWh for the first installation, the company promises to bring in its second l
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How difficult can it actually be to filter out the fish from the inrushing water?
Pretty difficult, I imagine. In no time at all, your filter will be completely clogged with all kinds of marine life and junk.
Re:FOE is in favor: Yeah, right! (Score:4, Funny)
How difficult can it actually be to filter out the fish from the inrushing water?
Pretty difficult, I imagine. In no time at all, your filter will be completely clogged with all kinds of marine life and junk.
The obvious solution is to just install a filter over it, to keep the first filter from getting clogged.
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Envision a cylindrical or cone-shaped strainer with the pointy end facing the incoming water, like the intake behind a dam. With a large effective surface area compared to the water inlet, fish can easily swim away and driftwood, etc, just migrates to the low-flow end of the filter and falls away.
Lower risk (Score:4, Insightful)
Nuclear is the safest power generation technology we've invented [nextbigfuture.com]. Nearly an order of magnitude safer than solar, 2-4x safer than wind and hydro. If they're claiming to have come up with a technology which has "much lower risk," count me skeptical until they've proved it. Too often the people claiming such things look only at exotic outlier events like big accidents, while ignoring the more mundane events like maintenance accidents. The thing is, nuclear is so safe that per unit of energy generated, casualties from maintenance accidents from other power sources outnumber casualties from exotic nuclear accidents. And it's such a concentrated power source under such high scrutiny by regulators that nuclear maintenance accidents are also lower per unit of energy generated.
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It depends on how you define "risk".
If, to you, risk is a a measure of the severity of a cataclysmic failure, then nuclear power has some fairly bad potential.
If, on the other hand, you measure risk as the likelihood of a cataclysmic failure, then nuclear is pretty damn safe.
Most people measure risk (personally) in potential severity which is why everyone is so afraid of everything. Kids are frequently disallowed from walking or biking to school because there is (technically) an exceedingly low chance of a
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The problem comes in when they happily accept a few excess deaths every year rather than the tiny risk of many deaths, even when the former adds up to more than the latter.
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Any waste strong enough to be dangerous isn't waste, its fuel. Dump that shit into a breeder reactor until you've wrung every last erg out of it. Hey, guess what? Now the remnants aren't very dangerous at all.
Much safer indeed. (Score:2)
" at a much lower risk than nuclear"
Indeed. Only if you go fishing at the foot of the concrete barrier, a mussel could drop on your head.
That's about it.
Old news (Score:2)
They've been running one of these in nova Scotia for decades. And I'm sure it's not the first either.
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It's a BBC story. England is the absolute worst "Not Invented Here" country on the planet. For the English, nothing exists until they've let a monsterous bureaucracy and army of know-nothing consultants design-by-committee it into atrocity.
Annapolis, Nova Scotia to be exact. Since the 80s. (Score:2)
http://www.nspower.ca/en/home/... [nspower.ca]
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The Boston & Roxbury Mill Dam did this back in the early 1800's. It failed, in part because of "stagnant and foul water" [wikipedia.org].
I say go for it. That failed project result din the Boston Back Bay, one of the priciest pieces of real estate in the US. Scotland, Wales and the rest of England could get new Londons sprouting up in a few years.
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Even if we captured ALL of it, we would be hard pressed to make any real difference in earth's rotation.
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I don't know about the Netherlands but they have definitely been doing so for almost 50 years at the Rance Tidal Power station [wikipedia.org] and since 2011 in South Korea [wikipedia.org].
The major problem with tidal pool generators is that they tend to silt up over the years reducing the potential output.
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"I honestly think that "green" technologies will always be significantly more expensive to run and maintain than traditional ones like gas/coal/oil"
This is only because the likes of coal and oil have their actual costs hidden. The health impacts of burning coal are paid for by tax payers in their national insurance tax used to fund the NHS so coal and oil get these defacto tax payer subsidies to max their true cost impact.
Like for like, green power is often cheaper, but it has no ability to mask a large pro