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.
That would mean we’d be well into the type 1 civilisation about 10^19W a year and we’ll be on the way to a type 2 civilisation.
There may be some neat tricks, this is an area I know I'm not good at, but you have to be very careful.
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.
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.
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'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.
Where did you get that idea? Hydrogen is extremely hard to work with and really really wants to escape from any containment vessel you put it in. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...
Your article talks about it positively.
Despite multi-decade mismanagement by government
especially now Scottish Independence is receding from the conversation
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.
He said it wasn't unusual to have gales in the winter, with >100Km/hr winds.
Seems to be a rich local resource.
There is a massive shortage of Scottish -> England transmission though. So it's a lot better to build them closer to where the power is needed.
However, there is nearly 10GW of HVDC in the pipeline to transmit power from Scotland to England (look up national grid eastern link 1, 2, 3 and 4).
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-locations-of-constru...
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.
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.
* Actually, many of them are owned by non-UK governments.