Barely noticeable amid the daily torrent of "news" flooding onto the internet – some of it important, much not – is a small item announcing: "Tidal Energy's project to install Wales' first full-scale tidal stream generator has secured a £390,000 grant from the Carbon Trust".

Even though that money is coming out of our pockets, it is hardly anything to get excited about – as much could easily be chewed up getting rid of one over-priced local authority chief executive.

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Surely "Grand Theft Eco", then you can include wind, carbon capture and all the other granny-killers.

At least it is a test/pilot scheme - I'm all for testing the merits of ideas which then get scrutinised thoroughly as to their validity. And at least tidal has the benefit of being predictable and consistent in its load capacity unlike wind even if its output is similar.

Wind is clearly an idiotic technology for grid generation however lets not throw tidal out just yet.

Meanwhile, China build coal fired stations [negating whatever we do here in Britain, if you believe the bollox about CO2 AGW guff] and are sinking money into the development of THORIUM REACTORS, technology which we can use and know of already, western engineers had a Thorium reactor running in the 60s, what the fu88 is stopping us?

I cannot understand such stupidity, it beggars logic and belief.

If we are foolish enough to ignore the coal or nuclear options then I agree with John Lish in that 'tidal' is predictable & consistent...which wind & solar is not. The energy is there for the taking & the process deserves exploring.
The cost? There you have me but, as we are all very much aware, expensive energy is better than none at all.

And the boffins will be scratching their heads when seals, fish, dolphins etc start showing up with mysterious leisions, or just chopped to bits!

If they're trying to do this in the Severn they're mad. The Severn carries and awful lot of fine silt with its large tidal range and that will get in bearings and wear away blades.
Being underwater one won't be able to see how many are broken, and it won't affect their subsidies.

More economic madness engendered by that loony AGW religion. Those bastard druids would run us all back to the stoneage.

Going for tidal power? I suspect a league of ecowibbling grand wizards behind this scheme. The greentard scum.

But it's odd coming from nature worshippers. Don't they realise that it'll slow the Earth down even faster and push the Moon out further in its orbit? At least at a rate more than nature intended. Don't they care about the Moon? Isn't that sacred too? Still, I suppose they are nothing if not inconsistent. And it will bugger up the lunar calendar.

Hey! That means it will screw up ramadan as well. Of course, anything that scews up ramadan is good. But the ragheads should be against it.

Wow! I never thought I'd ever have common cause with that simian filth, for entirely different reasons, of course. What a shame we breathe the same air. I wish they'd stop. In fact I think something ought to be done about that. A Western 'investment' programme of some sort. You know — to clean up the anthropoid environment and get rid of these Darwinian regressives. Come to think of it, we had something of the kind periodically in the past but clearly we didn't put our backs into it. Shame. What were those schemes called again? Oh yes, crusades. We need to do it properly this time.


We've had better weather on the August Bank holiday before. Shame AGW is such a crock. It would be much nicer if it were true. Never mind....


I'm going to go out now to water my tomatoes. The crop's not so good this year.


Hello. Hello. Anyone there...?

The renewablee versus fossil and nuclear energy debate is similar to the airship versus heavier than air aircraft contest: it would be romantically nice to have passenger carrying airships crossing the Atlantic but they can't come close to the economics and performance of wide-body jets. However, there is a niche role for both airships and renewables.

Absolutely....always been a mystery to me how Rommel & Monty were able to slug it out, with all those tanks & things & airplanes & whatever in the biggest sandpit of them all......and that in the forties! (Fe)
I think we've come a wee way since then...or maybe not.
In terms of renewable energy, if we are forbidden the alternatives, Tidal is by far the best bet. Either we try to find out if it works as imagined or we sit back & do nothing.
It is not too long ago that one regularly had to put one's 'heap' in for greasing lest the bearings wear out....today, with luck, they'll last the car's lifetime.....wow! someone must have done a bit of R&D.

EdCase: The Crusaders were a bunch of incompetent thugs somewhat worse than their opponents. What do you suggest for Muslims?...another Holocaust? I share your dislike of Islam but we should contain it where it belongs....in the desert from which it sprang &, with luck, its bearings will wear out

OT

Yes. Well sort of. But don't forget that the muslims started it all with their totalitarian aggression, and the Crusades were an entirely rational and wholesome response. They still are — the stimulus remains.

As for the Crusaders being worse, do you mean they were more incompetent or more thuggish? They could of course have been both but I suspect you mean more thuggish. To which I say they clearly weren't thuggish enough as islam is still a threat —indeed a global one as it always has been, and not just to us in the West.

But enough of this, PE. I notice you didn't enquire about my tomatoes. Don't you care about life on this planet?

....Yikes!....mea maxima...An horrendous oversight & even more so in that tomatoes is slang for testes in this part of the world.
I hope your tomatoes flourish, slang or botanical.
As for the Crusaders: Thuggery by itself is useless unless it is competently carried out & it wasn't. hence our present dilemma, the horns of which we are most definitely on.
One day there must be an 'OK corral' event & I hope we do better than in the Middle Ages.

That's very kind of you. You're a nice man. Thank you.

I'm with John Lish in saying that testing new stuff is necessary to see if it can be made to work -- Barnes Wallis chewed up a lot of time and money with that device of his.

The difference is that nowadays, even if the tidal thing doesn't work, vested interests will no doubt insist on building bigger ones to achieve a mythical 'economy of scale' and the expenditure goes up into the hundreds of billions.

Looking at the picture with the article has me scratching my head.

I've always visualized tidal turbines as long cylinders made in the image of the Medieval water wheel, with the turbine blades running parallel along the trunk of the cylinder. I mean, wouldn't the old water wheel design be a lot more efficient in capturing tidal forces than the wind turbine design? Didn't they figure out that one way back in the Dark Ages? Er... that the windmill design is best for wind and the water wheel best for water?

Hello? I know my degree work was in prehistoric civilizations, but... Earth to tidal energy scientists... ? Have we learned anything in the past 10,000 or so years?