The Rise of British Sea Power

The rise of British sea power

A barge towing an inverted windmill to the mouth of Strangford Lough will launch a new programme to create sustainable energy. Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor, reports

Sunday, 23 March 2008

Britain is set this week to enter a new age, generating energy directly from the seas that surge around its shores. On Saturday a strange, 122ft- long contraption – looking like an upside-down windmill – will set off from the Belfast dock that built the Titanic to produce the first electricity ever brought ashore from British tides.

The device – the first of its kind anywhere in the world – is expected to start a revolution which could lead to our island nation getting a fifth of its power from its surrounding waters, and to the far north of Scotland becoming "the Saudi Arabia of marine energy".

Remarkably, the pioneering device, which will start producing power from predictable and clean tidal energy, is the fruit of the vision and persistence of a single campaigning engineer, and has been developed by a small West Country firm. Though it has recently had some Government support, ministers have traditionally preferred to pour resources into much bigger projects, such as nuclear power stations. Indeed, the installation of the new device – near the mouth of Northern Ireland's Strangford Lough – is scheduled to take place only days after the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, are expected to sign a deal to jointly construct a new generation of reactors and to sell the technology around the world.

Yet the inauguration of a tidal turbine, dubbed SeaGen – which will generate enough electricity to power 1,140 homes by being placed directly in the tide race that rushes in and out of the lough – may unexpectedly prove to be the more significant event. While the much-vaunted Severn Barrage has only just begun to undergo a two-year feasibility study, experts are hailing the new turbine as the start of a giant leap in exploiting marine energy, where Britain, for once, is now leading the world.

Later this year, in another global first, a wave energy power station developed by an Edinburgh firm is to be installed in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Portugal. Next year, an even bigger one, off Cornwall, is expected to start feeding electricity into the national grid, and yet another is planned for the Orkneys. And Marine Current Turbines, the firm behind SeaGen, has joined with the utility company npower to develop a tidal power station off Anglesey.

Britain has the best tide and wave energy resources in the world – the official Carbon Trust estimates that they could together provide a fifth of our electricity. Yet, until recently, successive governments have set their face against developing them.

In the 1980s the then Department of Energy killed off promising proposals for exploiting the waves amid evidence that it did so because they threatened its (never realised) plans to expand nuclear power. In 1992 an official report concluded that it "did not see any justification for significant public expenditure" on offshore energy, and as recently as 2003 a Government White Paper ruled out the development of a Severn Barrage.

The tide only turned decisively about a year ago when, as The Independent on Sunday exclusively reported, ministers began backing plans for the £14bn, 10-mile barrage. Gordon Brown officially announced a feasibility study at the last Labour Party conference, and this got under way in January.

Launching the study, which will continue until 2010, the Secretary of State for Business, John Hutton, described the barrage's potential as "breathtaking". But though it could alone provide 5 per cent of the country's electricity from a completely dependable, renewable resource it could not be in operation until at least 2020.

And the Government's official environmental advisers – the Environment Agency, Natural England and the Countryside Council for Wales – have warned that the barrage would "cause irreversible impacts" to the estuary's "internationally important habitats" for wildlife and to its "unique ecology".

The scheme in Northern Ireland avoids these drawbacks by using a radically different technology. While the barrage impounds the rising tide behind a dam – letting it out, as it falls, through some 200 turbines in the structure – SeaGen sits in the tidal currents like an inverted windmill, capturing some of the energy by letting the water, rather than air, turn its sails as it flows.

While the barrage is a mammoth and expensive structure, which takes many years to build and then cannot be moved, the turbines can be constructed and sited relatively quickly, cheaply and flexibly. And while damming the Severn estuary inevitably fundamentally alters its ecology, SeaGen is expected to have far less impact on wildlife and the environment. But its technology's potential is no smaller. A report by the Sustainable Development Commission last year estimated that exploiting Britain's tidal currents could generate at least 5 per cent of the nation's electricity. Other authorities put it even higher.

Professor Stephen Salter of Edinburgh University, one of Britain's leading marine energy experts, estimates that the Pentland Firth alone could generate up to a quarter of Britain's electricity – more than is now being provided by all the country's nuclear power stations – making the channel between Orkney and the north Scottish mainland "the Saudi Arabia of marine energy."

Martin Wright, managing director of Marine Current Turbines, calls the firth, the "Mount Everest" of the industry, and describes its tidal currents as "the equivalent of an underwater hurricane". Every second, about 2.5 million cubic metres of water – enough to fill 1,000 Olympic swimming pools – passes at a speed of up to 12 knots across a line traced across the Firth.

This is just the biggest of a host of potential sites, usually where the tides are speeded up by being squeezed through narrow channels, forming one of the most intense resources provided by any form of renewable energy. In all, the Government estimates, Britain has about half of all Europe's such "tidal stream" potential and between 10 and 15 per cent of what has been identified worldwide, making it uniquely blessed.

Some 24 technologies, at various stages of research and development, have been put forward for exploiting tidal currents, but SeaGen – invented by Peter Fraenkel – a renewable energy pioneer who is now Marine Current Turbines' technical director (see right) is well in the lead.

In 2003 a smaller prototype, called Seaflow, was installed off Lynmouth in Devon becoming the first renewable energy device, powered by the sea, to be installed in the open ocean anywhere in the world. It operated through three winters, with regular force 8 gales, without any important technical failures – with an overall performance that exceeded expectations. Dr Fraenkel says it "proved the feasibility" of the technology.

He adds that SeaGen – four times as powerful, with a capacity of 1.2 megawatts – "is the world's first commercial scale system for generating electricity from marine currents" – and is "needed to prove economic and commercial feasibility".

Originally designed to be installed in 2006, it was held up by a series of events including the commercial takeover of the company due to install it, and an accident to a vessel due to carry it.

The latest delay occurred only last week, when bad weather held up the barge due to carry it from Belfast's Harland and Wolff shipyard to Strangford Lough, causing the installation – due for tomorrow – to be postponed. It is now expected next Monday.

It will be put in the 500m-wide Narrows at the mouth of the lough, where the currents exceed seven knots. This is a particularly important wildlife area, and so its operation will be closely monitored. The chief fear is that the turbines may damage marine mammals such as seals, but Dr Fraenkel says that they will turn too slowly, and that the animals are too nimble, for this to be a serious concern.

If all goes well, the company will then work with npower on the next development, a "tidal farm" of seven SeaGen devices, together capable of generating 10.5MW, in the Skerries of the North-west coast of Anglesey, which it hopes will start operating by 2012. It will be commissioned from next month and go into full commercial operation in July.

Later in the year, Pelamis Wave Power, an Edinburgh-based company, is planning to install the word's first ocean-going wave power station – made of a series of tubes, each the size of a small commuter train, that bob up and down with the waves off the Portuguese coast .

To have your say on this or any other issue visit www.independent.co.uk/IoSblogs

http://www.independent.co.uk/enviro...f-british-sea-power-799630.html?service=Print

It will probably scare the fish.

Great article, thanks reborn.
I remember reading about this developing technology when I was a kid...a LONG time ago.
wardogs

A prototype wave generator was installed off the Mendocino coast last year. It really upset a lot of fishermen, but it wasn't long before it sunk.

As long as that Gulf Stream current keeps heading their way... what happens to this alternative power source if it stops?

gdpetti said:

As long as that Gulf Stream current keeps heading their way... what happens to this alternative power source if it stops?

Click to expand...

Umm... one has nothing to do with the other...
The Gulf Stream is an ocean current, (thermal), tides are caused by the moon's gravitational pull.

posting some related articles, which proves that when the cost of ANYTHING gets too high, folks will re-Invent the wheel........


Leading article: A watershed for clean energy

Two events this week will set out very different visions of Britain's future in an age of accelerating climate change and diminishing supplies of oil – and very different views on how this country can lead the world. On Thursday Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy will meet amid much ballyhoo in the unlikely environment of Arsenal's Emirates Stadium, where they are expected to sign an agreement to build a new generation of nuclear power stations and to export the technology around the globe. And on Saturday, as we report today, a barge is set quietly to slip out of Belfast to install the world's first-ever commercial tidal power turbine in the much more attractive surroundings of Strangford Lough.


<!--proximic_content_off--> <!--proximic_content_on--> There are no prizes for guessing which will get the most attention, but in 20 years' time the story may be very different, for the low-key event in Northern Ireland may then well be seen either as the beginning of something radically new, or as a tragically missed opportunity. Which will depend on the decisions taken by Brown and Sarkozy, and by their counterparts around the world.


This is not merely an issue of nuclear versus renewables. True, Britain's record in this area is appalling. Blessed with by far the best renewable resources in Europe – tide, wave, and wind – we remain near the bottom of the European league when it comes to exploiting them.


True too, the nuclear industry – and, more particularly, a treacle layer of atavistic atomophiliacs in the civil service which seems to persist and reproduce despite changes in the departments dealing with energy – is largely responsible for this scandalous situation. There is plenty of evidence that the proper development of renewables in Britain has been stifled lest it pose the slightest threat to the nuclear dream. But this is about something even more fundamental, the whole direction in which society should develop.


Time and tide, they say, wait for no man, but tidal energy has been waiting for an awful long time for the men (and too few women) who run the country to realise its importance. Now, finally, they appear belatedly to have caught on and ministers have become enthusiastic converts to the Severn Barrage which, it is estimated, could by itself supply 5 per cent of Britain's electricity from an utterly predictable and dependable renewable source.


But they still have fully to realise the potential of the turbine which is about to start generating power, 12 years from the earliest date at which the barrage could possibly do so. Espousing a totally different technology – which draws energy from the currents as they run past, rather than impounding them behind a dam – is much cheaper, more flexible and faster to construct and get into operation. And its potential to supply Britain with power is just as great, maybe greater.


The issue is the same as with the nuclear obsession, whether to centralise or decentralise energy supply. Ever since Britain became the first country to develop a national grid in the 1930s, governments have sought to maximise centralisation. Ministers far prefer to make a few major decisions on building big power plants, than relying on a large number of smaller ones to save energy or to install small plants. But this will now have to start to change. One reason is that – apart from a few a typical instances like the Severn Barrage – renewables come in small packages: the sun, winds, waves, and tides are diffuse, distributed by nature for free, and they are best exploited accordingly. Decentralised energy is more efficient, as it suffers fewer distribution losses. It is cheaper, as the International Energy Agency has itself pointed out. And in an age of terrorism and disruption it is also, counterintuitively, more secure.


Gordon Brown has done well to resist pressure from John Hutton, his Secretary of State for Business, to scrap Britain's commitment to a European target to get 15 per cent of our energy – and thus 40 per cent of our electricity from renewable sources. It may be the only issue where he has recently stood up to the Blairites who were once his bitterest foes.
The Government has also gone part of the way to embracing the new imperative in its welcome plans to insist that all new homes are zero-carbon, generating their own energy. But the Prime Minister still falls far behind Chancellor Merkel of Germany, or even Mr Sarkozy, who are vigorously expanding decentralised programmes of small-scale renewables in their own countries. What is needed is balance, which so far the Government has woefully failed to provide – and a vision that stretches far beyond the Arsenal stands to the sea.

http://www.independent.co.uk/enviro...-idea-from-the-waters-of-the-nile-799629.html


Inspired idea from the waters of the Nile

<author>By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor</author>
Sunday, 23 March 2008
<!--proximic_content_on-->
Peter Fraenkel, one of Britain's most respected pioneers of renewable energy, has been working on the idea behind the new tidal turbine for longer than 30 years and originally used the technology on the River Nile.
<!--proximic_content_off--> <!--proximic_content_on--> Trained as an aeronautical engineer, Dr Fraenkel joined the Intermediate Technology Development Group – inspired by E F Schumacher, the author of 'Small is Beautiful' – while working in Africa. He conceived the idea of "taking a windmill and turning it upside down" in 1976 as a way of using river currents to pump water to irrigate fields.
After first testing the turbine on a rig mounted on a motor boat on the Thames, he installed a current-powered pump on the Nile near Juba in Sudan, where it worked for years before the civil war caused the project to be abandoned. As concerns about global warming grew, he said: "It occurred to me that if the idea worked in rivers, it might work at sea."
He first tried it in 1994 on a raft moored on Loch Linnhe on the west coast of Scotland and found that – though the technology worked – the raft was continually shifting on its moorings.
He produced the Seaflow prototype, anchored to the seabed off Lynmouth in Devon, and then Seagen – only to be frustrated by delays in getting it operational, the latest of which was last week.
"We were beginning to think we were jinxed," he said last night. "The installation is not an easy thing to do and we are keeping our fingers and toes crossed over the weather. We're hoping all will go well and will see what happens."

http://www.geotimes.org/aug07/article.html?id=resources.html


Turning the tide on renewable energy <table align="right" cellpadding="5" width="300"> <tbody><tr> <td></td> </tr> <tr> <td class="image_caption">SeaGen, the world’s largest tidal turbine, is being installed off the coast of Northern Ireland this month. With its twin rotors, SeaGen will produce electricity for approximately 1,000 homes. </td> </tr> </tbody></table> This month contractors will install the world’s largest, most powerful tidal turbine, named SeaGen, in Strangford Lough off the eastern coast of Northern Ireland. Marine Current Turbines (MCT), the company that designed SeaGen, estimates the turbine should provide enough electricity to power approximately 1,000 homes, serving as a prototype for future commercial tidal turbines.
SeaGen relies on the sea’s changing tides to create strong water currents that turn the blades of the turbine’s two 16-meter-wide rotors, which in turn spin a generator to create up to 1.2 megawatts of electricity. Tidal turbines, such as SeaGen, can “reduce the need for burning oil, gas and coal by putting clean energy into the grid,” says Paul Fraenkel, MCT’s technical director.
Because tides are predictable, tidal energy is more reliable than other forms of renewable energy, such as wind or solar power, Fraenkel says. Tidal energy may also be cheaper than wind because given the same amount of output, tidal turbines can be smaller than wind turbines, and thus cheaper to produce, he says.
Some critics are concerned the turbine’s spinning rotors may harm marine life. Researchers from Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland and St. Andrews University in Scotland will conduct environmental impact studies over the next few years to determine any such effects. Fraenkel says he expects SeaGen will receive a “clean bill of health,” given that MCT’s previous turbines have not caused any apparent harm.
Taking what it learns from SeaGen, Fraenkel says MCT plans to begin installation of a seven-turbine tidal farm off the coast of northern Wales in 2009 or 2010, which would provide more than eight times more electricity than SeaGen. Like the early days of aviation, Fraenkel says, it’s too early to tell how far-reaching tidal energy will be in the future. He is optimistic, though, that it will be “at the very least a niche market.”
Erin Wayman