OCEAN POWER
Being an island with thousands of miles of coast, the ocean would seem an obvious source of power.
There are 3 main ways of producing power by using the seas around us;
Tidal power
The UK has some of the largest tides in the world, with many tidal races in areas easily accessible from the shore.
One excellent example is the menai straits - which have a current of over 4 knots running many times every day. This occurs no matter what the weather, 365 days a year.
The current technology to do this is to build a dam across the tidal flow and treat the tide like a mini reservoir that occurs twice daily.
Chronicly underfunded research projects are trying to find ways to extract the power directly from the tidal flow.
Wave Power
Technically quite difficult to extract on a large scale, there is a vast amount of energy available from this source. Current technology requires either floats, channeling devices or funnels which convert the wave power to air movement to be used.
Interestingly, this study undertaken for Hawaii came to the following 2 conclusions (amongst others);
- Wave energy conversion devices are in an early stage of development and are not yet commercially viable.
- Such devices not expected to be available on a large scale within the near futuredue to limited research and lack of funding.
They
do conclude, however, that they would only have to utilise a tiny amount of
the power available to provide for all of their needs!
Ocean Thermal Energy
The ocean absorbs a vast amount of energy from the sun every day - even in the UK. There are several ways of extracting this. Plants exist in places as diverse as Iceland and Hawaii.
Plants to produce this form of energy can be based on offshore oil rigs that are no longer needed/used by the oil industry.
We are rushing headlong into ruining our own environments (or in the case of United Utilities, environments undoubtedly many miles away from the director's own homes) before viable alternatives have been properly researched.
