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What is stopping us from combining tidal and wind energy sources? Especially considering we are already venturing out in the sea for wind?
by kaushikt 6y ago
What is stopping us from combining tidal and wind energy sources? Especially considering we are already venturing out in the sea for wind?
- londons_explore 6y agoExtracting lots of energy from the tide usually requires natural or manmade lakes or eastuarys attached to the sea. Building those in deep water isn't really practical.
- Dumblydorr 6y agoTidal energy never panned out, it was far too expensive and no one came close to commercial viability over the dozen years of experimentation.
- usrusr 6y agoTidal streams are only strong in very specific locations. Consider a regular, straight-ish coast: the water volume difference between low tide and high tide may seem massive, but divided by the cross-section of an imaginary divider between coastal waters and off-shore waters the stream (meters cubed for tidal delta volume divided by meters squared for the cross section that the delta has to pass through) will be rather negligible. It would be very cool to have fully developed tidal generator products ready to deploy in the few places where geographic features force the delta through a tight bottleneck (anything from small bays and fjords in high tidal delta areas to the massive bottleneck of Gibraltar straight) but that's a pretty hard limited market that makes development investments rather unattractive when there are more universally applicable renewable energy sources untapped, like e.g. offshore wind.