Our politician’s response to this has been to encourage fossil fuel companies to find more oil in the North Sea, or in some cases demand we bring back fracking.
But the world is getting hotter – and this will only get worse if we stay on our present course.
But is there an alternative?
We have the obvious answers of wind farms and solar farms. These can now be built and producing energy for just the cost of the maintenance of current oil and gas power stations, but the usual answer is “what happens when there’s no sun, or it’s not windy enough”.
Batteries provide a short term solution, and many countries are now installing large battery installations to cope with those periods.
However, here in the UK we have another option that is simply not being pursued – tidal energy!
There's a familiar chorus of criticism when it comes to renewable energy - what happens if the sun doesn't shine or the wind is calm? But that certainly isn't the case when it comes to tides, which always ebb and flow. The UK has some of the strongest tides on Earth, so what role could tidal energy play in the government’s plan to decarbonise our system?
As interest in tidal power starts gaining momentum, on 22/10/23, the BBC ran the following story about about the race to create viable tidal generators for use around the UK's coastline:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67170625
The YouTube show, ‘Fully Charged’ investigated some of the technologies that can be used to generate electricity from the tide. Check it out below:
In short – floating turbine generators, anchored and using the tidal flow can produce megawatts of electricity with every tide. There have also been plans for a Severn barrage, which could supply large amounts of the UK’s electricity. There are other places in the UK where such a barrage could provide large scale power generation.