But as anyone who has ever battled the waves by boat or board knows, taming the tides will be a gargantuan task. Read More: A Climate Solution Lies Deep Under the Ocean-But Accessing It Could Have Huge Environmental Costsįor the entrepreneurs and researchers dedicated to harnessing that power, the ocean-that primordial space out of which so much of life on earth emerged-seems destined to once again supply the forces that will help create a new phase of history. Only the water is moving, pushing two 10-m.-long turbines with some 100 metric tons of pressure, and continuously generating 2,000 megawatts (mW), enough to power roughly 2,000 homes. There’s a real optical illusion-you think this thing is being towed through the water.” But the O2 is chained to the seabed, via four cables, each capable of lifting some 50 double-decker buses off the ground. “When you see it, and the tide is roaring past, it’s really hard to realize it’s stationary. “It looks like, well, a yellow submarine,” says Kermode. The O2, as it’s dubbed, created by the Scottish company Orbital Marine, weighs some 680 tons, is longer than a Boeing 747, and skims the top of the water like the world’s largest rowing scull. Neil Kermode, the center’s director since 2005, has seen some 35 tidal-energy projects tested, by startups that have come and gone-some shuttered for lack of capitalization or nonviable technology, some absorbed by larger companies like GE.īut the biggest project ever run at EMEC is still there, providing power for 1 in 12 Orcadian households. Founded in 2003, it’s headquartered in the Orkney Islands, off Scotland’s northern coast. For those reasons, it has for almost two decades hosted the world’s biggest grid-connected test bed for tidal energy, the Euro-pean Marine Energy Centre (EMEC). Cagney chalks this up to several factors, ranging from its geography-the country is blessed with some of the world’s fastest-moving tidal sounds-to its experience in working with offshore oil extraction. Scotland has become to tidal energy what Saudi Arabia is to fossil fuels. While the number of megawatts produced annually by tidal-in places from Canada’s Bay of Fundy to South Korea’s Sihwa Lake-is still small, notes Donagh Cagney, policy director for the advocacy group Ocean Energy Europe, “the increase is exponential.” For example, by 2050, tidal energy is expected to account for 11% of the U.K.’s electricity, compared with just 3% today.īut in remote coastal Scotland, some residents are already getting a taste of that future. Lately, however, buoyed by successful demonstration projects and a new interest in renewable energy bolstered even further by Europe’s anticipated turning off of Russian taps, tidal energy is moving increasingly into the mainstream. But while his Difference Engine, a mechanical calculator seen as a seminal fore-runner to the computer, would essentially go on to remake our world, Babbage’s ideas about tidal power drifted in the undercurrent for the next century and a half, largely the province of dreamers. He concluded that “the sea itself offers a perennial source of power hitherto almost unapplied.” Babbage was talking about tides, those lunar-guided movements of the world’s oceans, and the very synonym of dependable constancy. In 1851, Charles Babbage, the English mathematician and inventor, found himself preoccupied with what might happen should coal mines-then and now one of the primary sources of usable energy-become depleted.
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