The world’s most powerful tidal turbine – but can our grid handle it?

38 comments

1. "but can our grid handle it?"
   OUR grid? I don't have a grid. Do you?

2. Power grids are monitored for demand…if there is excess supply then you do not need all the plant to work.

3. Very cool but it also possible to combine with wind turbine like 90 degree tube collecting wind from 4 sides, like on islands

4. Our new datacenters consume upwards of 10MW to even 60MW by design. It will take quite a few of these to power a single facility. Plus, the power must be reliable enough to meet our resiliency and uptime requirements (which is why all DCs still use diesel generator back-ups). I like the idea, but it also appears that this model will also require a sizeable amount of battery storage during those periods where energy is not being generated (just like wind and solar). We have entire rooms in our DCs stacked with battery arrays (UPS) to hold the load until the gens can come online and all those batteries can only sustain the load for around 3-5 minutes!

5. How much cleaning time will keep it from running? Barnacles would love that thing.

6. And if they used my concept of a "gravity battery" you could store the energy for non-producing times of the day…. I have the solution.

7. peak power for a few hrs and nothing after that till the tide resumes.. need constant power or batteries..

8. How does this affect marine life? I like the idea from an engineering perspective, but there's usually no free lunch in the real world. Wind turbines seemed like a no-brainer until we realized how many birds they kill and where to bury giant fiberglass parts when their relatively short service life ends. I hope this doesn't go that way.

9. NO = if it's gets rid of Wind turbines

10. Labour's green energy economy promise would have helped massively towards a grid upgrade but they scrapped it to get more votes. Short term thinking as usual.

11. Give Westminster time they'll figure out a way to steal it from Scotland where the revenue rightly belongs.

12. 2:25 Happy to see Victron equipment being used!

13. One gas station at 1 GW available all the time versus 500 such machine sat 2 MW. which is not available all the time. Tides increase and decrease on a known cycle at each end being zero. So you would need incredibly expensive storage top use. Tides are not constant.

14. Maintenance will be hard

15. Wind turbines do turn with wind direction because the aerofoil profile works only one way. So do you also have to turn the tidal turbine round when the tidal flow turns?

16. Why only put 2 turbines on that thing? Put 10!

17. Why doesn't the government pursue this method of energy production?? , it works all the time its super efficient.

18. LOL…..How much does it cost to build and install. How much does it cost to replace. How much does it cost to maintain. How long does it last. How many other places have tidal "pinch points". Come on, now.
    It's burning or nukes…everything else is fantasy.
    Question marks have been intentionally omitted.

19. Another vanity project

20. Well done

21. "Investment" aka bribes and waste.

22. Wouldn't a series of vertical cylindrical fans anchored to the river/sea bed in and around estuaries be more efficient, easier to construct and maintain?

23. I wonder whether I'm clairvoyant? 
    Because it seems to me that a project like this will do phenominally well in an economic area that hasn't pretty much entirely isolated itself from its biggest markets. Sure, the company could scale and ramp up production, but it would need to be able to connect to a grid, and that grid is already immensely compromised, with other suppliers already faced with waits of a decade or more to be "plugged into" the grid, even when the main parts of the grid are only a few miles away! Yet Orkney is possibly 100 miles from the infrastructure needed to accept this level of power.
    And just like every other great bit of British engineering from the telephone to the LCD, it seems that the inevitable end result of this will be that the company will set up "A division" in the EU, Canada (that's where the other highest tidal movement is), S. Korea (that's another one), or possibly the USA, places where their governments and investors understand the realities and possibilities of technology like this.
    I'll grant you that Labour's GB Power (Is that the right name?) has the potential, but I doubt that they'll bring in the investment, because, as I have already pointed out, the country's investors have never recognised potential in the past.

    Being a Brit who has lived outside the UK since '95, I am eternally saddened by how much damage has been done to the country by this hatred of others, excused by opportunistic, hateful, self serving monsters who have led the country into this idiotic isolationism. Because, any way you slice it, you can see that this sort of project needs the sort of funding that only the large pockets of an EU or similar organisation, can provide.

24. I've been made to feel excited about a new green energy source one too many times. This sounds good but I'll believe it once it's actually been scaled up and shows how it works in reality. The ocean is a brutal place and I'm sure there are a lot of challenges they didn't exactly elaborate on.

25. Finally ! Common let’s make this happen and scale

26. Beyond human comprehension ! How very condescending , I think most grown-ups could comprehend it okay .

27. battery for
    temp storage

28. This will still need some form of storage when the tides are changing direction.

29. Seems like a quite inefficient way to generate power. That thing might cost something like 35m pounds to make. Would take 1 trillion to power all houses in the uk

30. If wind turbines chop up birds, how many fish, particularly migrating big salmon, whales and dolphins does it chop up?

31. Why not put them in every major river with a good flow speed, such as the Rhine and Rhone? Ever sailed down the Danube? I have. There are hydro dams all along it. Same on the Volga.

32. THANK YOU thankyouthankyou !! 🇬🇧 I love videos like this !! Can't wait for the larger models !! 🙂

33. I'd love to see this up and running; there are likewise a few fantastic places off the Canadian coast where similar tech could be put to work … but for the grid (and various other hurdles).
    However, while this is very predictable, it is not constant. Tides have their off-times too – 4 times a day. So (as with all other green solutions), where is the giant battery built into the grid to capture excess, then release it when production is off?

34. Second only to the Bay of Fundy.

35. Great solution. Even better than Nuclear Fusion.

36. What’s is the impact sea life , will it be chopping up dolphins and whales 😮

37. If it was economical, it would already have been deployed on mass with private funding.

38. Should have done this years decades ago…Too focussed on hating Europeans because blurr and scared to death about trans in sports public toilets.