Bishop Hill Ripoff tide
Aug 14, 2014 Energy: other I was surprised to hear a couple of people speaking up in favour of wind and tidal power at the Tartan Heart Festival last weekend. I had assumed that everyone had now worked out that they were a long way from being commercially viable. Perhaps this is because of the insistence of some in the renewables sector that power from the oceans could make people lots of money. Our old friends at Bloomberg New Energy Finance were one such company, talking up prospects for the sector and explaining how the arrival of big engineering companies was changing everything.
However something else has been stirring, and that has been the interest of the engineering and industrial majors. In the last three years, Siemens, Rolls-Royce, Andritz and French naval defence company DCNS have bought minority or controlling takes in the tidal device makers Marine Current Turbines, Tidal Generation, Hammerfest Strom and OpenHydro respectively – while ABB and Alstom have done similar with wave energy specialists Aquamarine Power and AWS Ocean Energy.
As Neil Kermode, managing director of the European Marine Energy Centre, host of the three wave devices at Billia Croo and three tidal machines off another Orkney island, puts it in an interview in our weekly newsletter, Clean Energy & Carbon Brief: “These companies don’t have to do this, but they want to – and that is hugely important recognition that this sector has moved far beyond the man-in-a-shed businesses.
How different things look a couple of years on:
Development and commercialization of marine energy technologies is “taking longer than hoped and costing more money than expected”, a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance has found.
The analysis firm has revised its 2020 global installation forecast for the sector downward to 21 MW for wave power, down 72 per cent on its previous forecast, and to 148 MW for tidal power, down 21 per cent.
This decline in interest is no doubt driven by negative sentiment about the government's willingness to maintain the warm bath of subsidies in which the crony capitalists like to wallow.
Reader Comments (31)
"However, BNEF noted that there is still some good news for the sector...project developer Atlantis Resources received a $10.55m grant...successfully floated a £12m IPO on the London stock exchange...And project developer Tidal Lagoon Swansea Bay is awaiting...subsidy support for a 320 MW project off the Welsh coast."
The "good news" seems to be mostly about raking in dollars.
I assume that due to the difficulties involved and causing these delays, a request will be submitted to increase the size of subsidies. That will fix the problem.
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In other words, the corporates merely surf the waves of subsidy and currently-fashionable political sentiment, but know when it is time to get off. Ultimately, all such waves break on the shores of reality.
"Pelamis Project Dead In The Water"
Worth googling.
But who cares as long as the subsidies keep flowing in.
There's that thing called the "Cruel Sea" which tends to destroy such installations very easily.
We have now got ourselves into a sort of perpetual motion machine or possibly death spiral where no-one is going to invest in energy because the government has turned the playing field into a ploughed field.
I would have thought that, given perhaps marginally more generous tax breaks than are available for company start-ups and possibly for a slightly longer period wave power and tidal power ought (at least theoretically) to be a viable proposition.
This has also struck me as being one area where computer modelling could provide a realisitc assessment of the prospects of that since we are dealing, as far as I know, with some straightforward laws of physics.
The tide at least is known to come in and go out rwice a day which ought to make its ability to produce energy a damn sight more predictable than windmills.
But since government has chosen to throw large sums of taxpayers' money at relatives and cronies and the windfarm industry it is hardly surprising that other potential suppliers of electricity are going to demand similar treatment. If my competitors were being given preferential treatment a) by being subsidised, b) by being guaranteed a market for my product, and c) by being paid on occasion not to produce my product then I would certainly be demanding similar treatment, if only because my shareholders would sack me if I didn't.
"... 2020 global installation forecast for the sector downward to 21 MW for wave power ...". That's much less than one MT30 gas turbine. In global terms that's nothing. And the tidal is only 4x that for the whole world. Both dead in the water.
Mike Jackson
Problem with tide is it turns off a couple of times a day, predictable but not much use for a couple of hours at slack water. There is no "renewable" capable of 24/7/365 operation, with the exception, perhaps, of methane from waste.
SandyS
I agree with you and I'm not for a nanosecond suggesting that tidal would be workable for baseload. But at least you ought to be able to work out to within a watt or two what the next day's supply is likely to be, when, and for how long. (Don't tell me I'm over-simplifying; I know!)
Wind and solar can throw your calculations out minute to minute; tidal should at least provide some level of certainty.
In theory, that is.
In 1966 the French built a tidal power station on the River Rance. It is still operating, but they have never built another. Why? What problems have they found (apart from the obvious of silting)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rance_Tidal_Power_Station
Here is a list of Tidal Power stations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tidal_power_stations
It is worth a visit if you are in the St Malo area.
Bearing in mind that nowhere in Britain is further than 70 miles from the sea AND that the energy from tides is easy to predict, it seems surprising that tide (and wave power) is at such a technologically low state. The reason comes from a decision made by civil servants some 40 years ago. Who remembers the Salter Duck? A proposal was made to develop this into viable energy but unfortunately the civil servants tasked with producing the report for consideration by Parliament completely miscalculated the costs by a factor of 10. The rest is history.
Device manufacturers also went down a bit of a blind alley by building prototypes that sat on top of the waves instead of under them to capture the tide. Such devices are very readily smashed by the amplitude of large waves.
Consequently tidal and wave devices are some 20 years behind that of wind turbines.
tonyb
I could not care less about any of these schemes including a proposal to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, as long as they do not take money out of my wallet. On the other hand a proposal to sack 500 000 people in public administration?
99% of the population do not have sufficient interest or knowledge to work this out.
The media seems unable to dig any deeper than the latest "renewables" press release and does not enlighten. Indeed at least once a week we read or hear of some "renewable" energy source which is cheap and plentiful. "It's a no-brainer!" they cry, as indeed it is.
Joe & Josephine Public naturally conclude that only the greed of Big Oil stands between us and this attainable energy nirvana.
The reporters must all be quite young too, since none seem to remember any previous promises of liberation from Big Fossil through these alternative technologies.
No new technology is required for the tidal power which runs on sea water impounded by dams. It is effectively a hydro system with generation occurring on both the incoming and outgoing tide with a dead period when the tide turns. The problem is the pay back period. The civil engineering works involve a very high initial but cost once the investment costs have been paid off years of very low cost energy will result. The problem is not technology but financial. Most modern investors are not interested in the longer term.
"Problem with tide is it turns off a couple of times a day, predictable but not much use for a couple of hours at slack water."
That depends on how it works. One approach is to build a big reservoir (like a harbour, only closed off) next to the sea, and allow water to flow in at low tide and out again at high tide, blocking the flow in between. Slack water is when you get the biggest difference in height between sea and reservoir, and so when you can get the most power. By opening and closing the gates at different times, you can shift the peak power production around.
It's a bit like hydro - it works, but there are not many locations naturally suitable for it, and building an artificial one would increase the cost a lot.
According to an article in the IET professional journal a couple of years ago, tidal generation will take another 15 years or so before it is viable due to the corrosive nature of the marine environment and the necessity of developing new materials for the equipment.
Mike Jackson's comments about the slack period at the top and bottom of the tides are also pertinent. Best thing surely is Archimedes screw turbines (I think that's what they are called) in rivers. Must be careful though - might scramble the fish!
On the other hand, if the queen has such a system for Windsor, it is obviously allowable - or did the DoE override the PoW?
" There is no "renewable" capable of 24/7/365 operation"
Sure there is: hydro power, probably the best, most reliable and cheapest of all methods to produce electricity. Unfortunately only practical at a strictly limited number of sites and with some undesirable side effects (like inundating large areas).
Hydro power has very nearly 100% reliability plus the capability of ramping power up and down from 0 to 100% of nominal capacity within a few minutes.
Re Nullius in Verba Aug 14, 2014 at 6:29 PM
When you check out the Barrage de la Rance at St Malo in France you will see that the capacity factor (some people call it the loading factor) of this tidal power plant is 25%. Same as onshore windmills. If one wishes to use tidal for base load this will require a lot of tidal stations all along the coast. It will be very expensive to get real power out this. Tidal looks useless to me.
tonyb
The civil servants belonged to the Energy Technology Support Unit, set up in 1974 as an agency on behalf of the Department of Energy and which was operated by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. No clash of interests there!
Since wave power is effectively concentrated wind, I've long thought it at least half-way sensible.
Well, That's a bit harsh "Ripoff Tide".
From an Economists perspective and as comments above:
No new technology is required for the tidal power which runs on sea water impounded by dams. The problem is the pay back period. The problem is not technology but financial.
Every Major HydroElectric project over the last 200 was not economically viable in terms of 'opportunity cost', which is why governments, not private investors build big hydroelectric projects- you don't get payback from a large Hydroelectric system for 20+ years. Even small private hydroelectric plants take 5-10 years to pay off. The great thing about them though is that once they are paid off the running costs are very low.
Le Rance tidal barrage in France is a good example:
In spite of the high development cost of the project, the costs have now been recovered, and electricity production costs are lower than that of nuclear power generation (1.8c per kWh, versus 2.5c per kWh for nuclear).
Nullius in Verba
Whatever you do with a source which turns off, either predictably or unpredictably, means you have to have a back which can be used at any time. This immediately doubles the cost. With tide no matter what you there will be times when it doesn't work without doubling the cost, why bother?
I try and explain it to people in the following way. You have a car powered by the internal combustion engine an that has worked well for years. Then the government come along and say you've got to use a car which only works when the sun shines, so you put your nice reliable car in the garage and on a sunny summers day off you go to work, and in the afternoon you come home again. Then on a dark winter morning the solar car won't work. That's OK say the government you can buy one which only works when it's windy. For a few weeks this works well then one day there's no wind and no sun the government say that's OK we have a car that works when the tide is coming in and going out. At this point any sensible person says, no thanks have the other two back I'll stick with the internal combustion engine - I can't afford to run 4 cars when 3 only work sometimes.
Tides do not "turn off" They are one of the constants of our environment, unlike wind.
Also the tidal cycle is 12 hourly (more or less) between high tides, so you have flow going one way for six hours, and then the other way for 6 hours. it never "turns off" there are short periods where the tide is "slack" at high and low tide. There are lots of places where around the coast where there are tidal streams involving billions of cubic meters of water- the Menai straits for example.
Not only that, tides rotate around " Nodes" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphidromic_point so high tides are at different times all around the UK and European coast so there is always going to be somewhere that has a flowrate that is fast enough to turn a turbine. The problem is not technology, all the long term money went into wind turbines, mainly, I think, because Denmark has very little tide...
I studied Civil & Structural Engineering in the late 1960s and remember a lecture on the proposals for a Severn Barrage given by Prof. Eric Wilson, later Chair of Civil Engineering at Salford. Fascinating.
I remember that, taken together with the economic benefits of a second Severn road / rail crossing, there was a strong economic case for 'his' scheme but at that time the Treasury couldn't fit the scheme into their pre-determined 'boxes' and the proposal had been put on ice.
Of course there have been previous and many subsequent schemes.
Nowadays these founder not on whether or not they would work nor on anything as uncouth as considerations of the eyewatering expense (witness the success of the crooks in BigWind) but on the effect on wildlife,
Perfectly OK to shred bats and raptors. Not OK tfor water levels to exceed the inside leg measurement of the British Standard Duck. Or some such nonsense, anyway.
Sometimes you can be just too skeptical. Nobody seems willing to build nuclear power plants either without a guaranteed government subsidy (apart from the Prism reactor). It is just a plain fact that sometimes government has to push technologies in order to encourage industry to start pulling and this is often for the greater good of all. That's how the internet started, how the national grid was set up and how we have nuclear power and most of our other power plants. All these things brought prosperity. I see no harm in subsidies if the idea has big potential or we are safeguarding our future and the investment is relatively small. Better than propping up the casino capitalism of banks, creating unproductive housing booms, private finace initiatives that cripple our NHS or an overpriced high speed railway that nobody needs! At least tides and waves have the potential for base load. As for being years away; it strikes me as being a a darn sight easier than fusion energy (which is also worth funding).
This is electricity supply - like water, mail, railways and roads ie infrastructure, it is a foundation for the success of everything else and should not be left to the vagaries of the fickle markets which quite often delivers the worst alternative (I sit here typing on the qwerty keyboard of a wintel computer - both of them active barriers to progress). The reason we have such a disjointed energy policy is because the CEGB, SSEB national grid were privatised. Like most privatisations this has been a disaster for consumers and the promised competition, investment and price drops became cartels, disinvestment and price hikes with lots of crony capitalist pay rises for untalented fatcats. I saw this energy policy car crash coming as soon a Thatcherism took over and helped destroyed both coal and nuclear power in one fell swoop. We should have had a dozen other PWR's by this time, backed up by coal power from the 200 years of coal under our feet. That was the CEGB plan. Instead of that common sense, we got free-market dogma.
The wind farm subsidies are just legalised banditry. A fairer way would have been to force landowners to accept them on pain of losing their other subsidies. If the land was unproductive anyway - and hilltops usually are - then why pay anything?
Martin
+1
Shades of..
James G
Agree with you, too. I mourned the loss of Salter's project because he really was making progress and got stitched up. In those days, there was no suggestion that the power his system produced would carry a premium, either. Mrs T (for all her faults) would have had apoplexy!
Why on earth would you want to further mess up the coastline with tidal dams (at vast expense) when we already have 24/7/365 power sources with abundant fuel to power them?
What happens when there is a tidal surge, hurricane or King Tide?
Boys and their toys. On WUWT, there was a post recently about the latest proposal to put up giant wind-catching thingies (which the admirable John Brignell demolished years ago), but some people just can't let go of the idea.
Sorry to be a wet blanket, but the "problem" is non-existent. It is only government regulation that stands in the way of copious, cheap energy, and all these other proposals are either boondoggles, wistful/wishful thinking by people who imagine that they know how to solve non-existent problems, and sometimes both.
Why should taxpayers fund a better mousetrap?
Re Aug Mark Cooper 15, 2014 at 7:57 AM "Tides do not "turn off" "
Well, tides do turn off.
Depending on the location, the slack period can be a up to an hour and on either side of the "slack moment" current can be very low for a long time. Hydro turbines are not very effective at low flows. The upshot is for the Barrage de la Rance that its load factor - ratio of average output to rated output - is only 25%. Or, in other words, this tidal power station only works 25% of the time.
Development cost may have been recovered, but maintenance cost (especially cleaning) of a tidal plant is still an issue.
"Well, tides do turn off. Depending on the location, the slack period can be a up to an hour and on either side of the "slack moment" current can be very low for a long time."
As I said, it depends on the mechanism. One generator can simply tap the flow, with stoppages at slack water. Another can build gated reservoirs that are opened and closed at intervals, for which slack tide is the peak of generation. Even in one location, the two working together can generate throughout the day. And as Mark Cooper said above, in all tidal basins there are places about which the tides rotate, so it is always high tide somewhere.
The tides rotate around New Zealand, for example, so when it is high tide on one side of the island it is low tide on the other side. The flow through the narrow channel between the islands when this happens is fierce. There are three such points all close to the UK, giving a broad range of tidal states at any instant, even resulting in double-tides at many places along the south coast.
Unlike wind and solar, the tides are such that one can genuinely rely on an overlap of different cycles locally. It's the same principle as hydroelectric, and hydroelectric schemes *are* quite often worth doing in their own right. Especially when you can use pumped storage to store energy in the short term. It's why they often exclude hydro from the subsidies, because in those places where it works, it wipes the floor with wind and solar, and nobody sane would do either if the same subsidies were available with hydro. The limitation is that there are only a limited number of locations suitable, because of the shape of the land, and they're almost all built on.
Tidal power is not an answer on its own, shouldn't be given subsidies, and without subsidies cannot come close to coal and gas. In a sensible world we wouldn't even think of doing it, except on a small scale locally where it's especially suitable. But of all the engineering issues getting in the way of it, intermittency is not one of them. There are easy ways round that one.
UPDATE : 14 months later Aquamarine Power calls in administrators
Another failed wavepower project which sank in Australia in 2011 then Bolt has 2014 updates
- We also had a 2013 post that discussed the Wave Hub project in Cornwall ..apparently idle
- details of Pelamis failure in 2014
- "One person I spoke to runs a wave energy company in the US He readily admitted that wave energy would never be competitive and that there was a recent history of such companies failing" here on BH
- Siemens pulling out of the SeaGen Portaferry project in April 2015 (Siemens has sat on its hands since 2008 and just sold the project to Singpaore corp)