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Originally Posted by Taf
We live on an island surrounded by the sea, so why is tidal power generation always getting blocked on "environmental grounds"?
A barrage from near Cardiff to Weston-super-Mare has been touted for many, many years, but it gets blocked to "protect migratory birds' feeding grounds". The whole idea is that rising sea levels are allowed past a barrage, then released through turbines before the tide starts to rise again. So the "feeding grounds" get exposed twice a day.
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They don’t get exposed in the same way they do naturally because the barrage and the turbines change the rate at which the tide comes in and out. They also fundamentally alter the way water flows in an estuary with not entirely predictable results. Given how critical these grounds are for a very large number of birds, the risk is too great. Creating an environmental catastrophe in the name of solving another one is not sensible.
There are other ways of exploiting tidal flow energy, such as creating reservoirs within the estuary that fill and empty with the tide, which would operate on a smaller scale than damming the entire thing. There are also turbines which can be placed somewhere there is a particularly rapid tidal flow.
Orbital Marine are pioneers in this area and they have successfully demonstrated a 2 megawatt turbine in some particularly fast-flowing tidal streams around Orkney. They’re now moving to full production and expect to be deploying commercial tidal generation machinery next year.
https://www.orbitalmarine.com/o2-x/