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World's First Lagoon Power Plants Unveiled In UK
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.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
is essentially what they are building, although a two way one. While Friends of the Earth may like it it appears not all do with concerns over the impact on fish in the lagoon and access to spawning sites.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Don't they already do this in the Netherlands?
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.
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.
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.
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?)
Hasn't Nova Scotia been doing this for 20 years?
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.
First ever tidal power lagoon?
Prior art: http://boston1775.blogspot.com...
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 lagoon at GBP 90, the same as they are already paying for nuclear. Since the power output will be far less than from nukes, and will still be fluctuating-though-predictable, what would the point be? Tidal lagoons would be good for islands and other off-grid coastal areas with a usably high tidal range. The place to build something like this would be Labrador.
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 something that doesn't leave 1%-used-up fuel that "needs" to be stored for 10k years. Yes, such designs are entirely possible.) the risks can be reduced quite a lot, too.
I'm really not sure which I prefer, but I do note that there's very little thought and quite a lot of agendas and ideology doing the rounds in this sort of "planning".
Nuclear is the safest power generation technology we've invented. 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.
The Boston & Roxbury Mill Dam did this back in the early 1800's. It failed, in part because of "stagnant and foul water".
Oh great, now the Moon will slow down, and crash into Earth!
And I think of Brooke Shields?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I wonder what the cumulative effect of this will be on the Earth's rotational period. If the Moon/Sun gravity pull drags a half million tons of sea water into the lagoon over the course of the day, and we restrain it there for a large portion of the time that it would naturally have run back out, this will have some affect on the center of mass and the Earth's rotation - would this end up being a cumulative thing that gives us a leap second per decade or something?
Let's not forget what is being suggested here, clean renewable energy which is promised to be much more predictable than wind and solar. Reading the previous comments about predictable vs dispatch-ability are spot on, but maybe forgetting one thing. The issue with current renewables is not that we don't have enough power, the big power stations produce more than enough most of the time but it is key in the distribution infrastructure that the National Grid control the amount of power entering and leaving the network (supply and demand) and the predictability of large amounts of tide energy coming onto and off the grid compares favourably with balancing renewables production with nuclear and other sources putting power onto the grid. The cost may be high for consumers initially, but then again new technologies in the power industry always are. There is an opportunity with tidal power to generate a huge amount of electricity in the UK, with no CO2 or other nasty things like radioactive waste. I honestly think that "green" technologies will always be significantly more expensive to run and maintain than traditional ones like gas/coal/oil and even nuclear, but the fact is that the additional cost is worth paying to look after the environment. It may not offset the cost to consumers, but in terms of government backing for this I could see the lagoons having a positive impact on tourism in the areas they are built too.
" 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.
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Alan Cox lives there.
http://www.nspower.ca/en/home/...
..don't panic
That's a river barrage. In the case of the Severn the barrage plan was turned down and lagoons favoured instead. From the point of view of the project lagoons are therefore a different enough concept. Nobody is claiming that they are inventing tidal electricity generation here.
They've been running one of these in nova Scotia for decades. And I'm sure it's not the first either.
What will the impact be on sea life? (i.e. how many little critters will be killed by the machinery AND will the changes in intertidal areas upset any marine animal repriductive cycles?>
What will the impact be on the seas themselves? (i.e. trapping and holding water that was supposed to flow freely, changing the way the water is likely to affect soil erosion patterns and thus impact the creation and removal of various sediments and the resulting effects on the way soils and freshwater runoff the land into the sea)
What imapact will this have on global ocean circulation and therefore on the climate? (Remember: proponents of chaos theory noted that a butterfly flapping is little wings over the Amazonian jungle could affect weather patterns over Europe...) How much more significant could it be to remove enough energy from the sea to power many of the needs of the UK??? (this energy is not "free" and appearing from nowhere - it is kinetik energy removed from the ocean)
If we are going to ask all sorts of similar questions of conventional power sources, then it's only proper to apply the same jaundiced eye to so-called green energy sources. NOTHING is entirely free and without consequences. At least when we burn oil, we are not removing energy from a natural system that had other uses for it (like the oceans) - oil is just sitting there, effectively in storage, deep within the Earth. Wind, Sun, and flowing water are actively used by the environment and using THOSE sources of energy diverts them from their normal uses.
So they expect that sea level will remain same for the next 120 years?
Tidal Lagoon seems just another way to say Barrage Tidal Generation. There are a handful in the world (Three I think, Canada, Russia, and France). There is a reason why there are so few.
1) Like most Hydro projects, there is limited geography that is suitable for the purposes, and usually there are environmental repercussions. In the case of the ones above they are all at the mouth of a river exiting into the sea.
2) Seawater. Maintenance is a bitch, and construction costly. You need to dam up the area first, construct your facility, then take down the dam. Seawater likes to destroy metal and moving parts, which is what turbines are generally made from. People will point out the fact that ship screws and the like have been doing it for years, however ships are required to be taken out for servicing every few years, not so easy with a tidal dam...
3) Low return of investment. Generally speaking the amount of MW generated as a ratio to how much it costs to build and maintain isn't all that great compared to other methods. That said, most of the ones in existence are proof or concept or experimental stations, so are likely smaller in scope. There might be savings on a larger scale...
That said, they are truly renewable, and less subject to variation. You don't need wind to blow or sun to shine. Also unlike a traditional hydro project, you are not going to be subject to drought or low water either (if you are, you gots bigger problems than lack of electricity).
It always amazes me how those who know so little about nuclear power are the first to start barking, turning in circles and pissing all over themselves at its mention.
The good thing about nuclear is it will always be there for the rational to use. So, after you Gaia freaks succeed in reducing the human population to 500 million, the sons and daughters of the rational will be the ones to use it.