Articles on Tidal Energy
We’ve all had the experience of flipping through an in-flight magazine and finding ourselves utterly incapable of generating even the vaguest interest in any of the articles they contain. We can almost hear the editor ordering the staff journalists to write something completely noncontroversial, say, walruses are cute and quirky, daily exercise is not too burdensome once we commit ourselves to a goal, gambling is fun but potentially addictive, etc. What comes back for publication is banal but unobjectionable content that adequately fills the pages.
No offense to the author of this piece on tidal energy, but I got the same feeling here. Clean energy is vital in our effort to mitigate climate change. Tidal is less variable than solar and wind. Water is lots denser than air. There are places that tidal energy makes sense (mainly, sad to say, in places with very little load). All perfectly true, though pretty much immaterial.
Having said that, the conclusion that tidal will play an important role in the clean energy mix of the 21st Century, isn’t easy to dispute, considering everything that could possibly happen over the next 80 years.
But in truth, it’s supremely unlikely. The cost of tidal energy in the few places it’s been implemented (largely in the high latitudes of the UK) is really unattractive, and there is no clear path for bringing it down into line with competitive solutions. Sure, there is some possibility that solar and wind won’t scale as well as we think, and advanced nuclear will never offer a meaningful contribution. But at this point, it seems quite unlikely.
As a local politician in Philadelphia said as I was growing up, “There comes a time in every campaign where the winner wins and the loser loses.” It appears that this is exactly what’s happening in renewable energy.
