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Tidal Basins Project
A stunning photograph of the raging power of a stormy sea. But while the power of a stormy sea is immense, so is the strength of the tide.
Introduction
We realised when putting our plans together for the production of tidal electricity that sea storms could be a formidable problem. The sea is very, very powerful.
We found a way around this problem.
Next was how to make tidal electricity viable. No subsidies.
We found a way around this problem. Our scheme is profitable at £50 per MWh.
Then we needed to overcome the intermittency of the tide. We have to make electricity round-the-clock, 24/7, irrespective of the state of the tide.
We found a way around this problem.
There is 6 - 12 gigawatts available in the UK and anywhere from 2 - 8 gigawatts on the North Sea coasts of the European mainland, where the sites we have carried out simple investigations on have the same tidal range as the UK.
The schemes outlined here generate this much electricity without any subsidy. Some of this electricity could actually be "free" because we incorporate other industry into our ideas.
This is how we can do it.
In the beginning
The coast of the United Kingdom has a very large tidal range, almost unique in the world, a range also available to ports and harbours of countries on the European mainland that have North Sea coasts.
This tidal range could be used to produce a lot of electricity. The tide is completely predictable. It also represents an assured, 100% secure energy source. And we can generate power near the point where it is needed, reducing transport costs.
Incredibly, tidal power actually isn't used at all.
So we decided to look into this, because it should be.
We started work in 2017.
We paid for all of this ourselves. All the research, all the site visits, the models and the comparisons, the calculations, the maps, the licencing, photography, the patent and copyright fees, the surveys. Even this website.
"We" are a group of people who "grew up" to become project managers. While loosely based around Cambridge we have managed all over the world. Our backgrounds range from engineering to finance to film making. All of us are mathematically literate. All of us hold I.P. portfolios and all of us come from a stable of "getting things done." We have worked in big companies, we have all run our own businesses.
It was of course easy to log the problems, they had been well identified:
(1) Cost and (2) Intermittency.
Overcoming these was essential.
Cost: the electricity had to be produced to match the 'buy-in' price of £50 per megawatt hour. This is what the price was until the energy crisis hit. We targeted a return to this level.
Intermittency: Other sources of renewable electricity (wind and solar) "only work when the weather is right" but the real, essential need is to have power reliably available round the clock. Intermittency means a lot of backup is needed, adding to costs. In fact it requires a "double layer" of power production.
For "tidal power" to overcome intermittency requires some method of overcoming the "turn of the tide" problem - a period when the tide goes from ebbing to flowing, when there is no flow. Finding a way around this would enable "tidal power" to be part of "base load" - always available, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Just like nuclear is.
To make "tidal electricity" work and be economically viable, we had to overcome these two problems. Otherwise as far as we were concerned, tidal power was a non-starter.
We set up our own research programme to answer these issues.
We were successful, and this is what we came up with.
Tidal Electricity without subsidy. The "viability" issue.
It took some thought to find out how to make enough tidal electricity to be worthwhile, given we needed to match the current strike price, and, whatever else, produce electricity without the need for taxpayer subsidy. Our target was (and is) £50 per megawatt - hour.
Firstly, building in the sea not practicable. Just inspecting the photo on the cover of this website shows its huge power. It would be too expensive. We shifted our focus to rivers near the sea where there is an abundance of derelict (or "brownfield") land but there is also the same large tidal range, without having to face the occasional fury of the open sea. This was cost saver number 1.
If we are going to build basins on riverbanks these are little more than large dry docks. These have been around a while now; a 200 year old technology. We need turbines and pumps and generators. These have also been around for a long time, indeed the Romans had machinery in this domain and GE developed specialised turbines for hydro electricity around 100 years ago. Weir Group, in Glasgow, have been making pumps for even longer. We can just go out and build or buy, so no need for research, although some optimisation could help raise efficiency. Cost saver number 2.
We found ways to really substantially increase the power we could obtain. More a revenue benefit than a cost saver. Number 3.
Despite all this work we realised we still could not reach our target of £50 per megawatt hour.
We looked again at the whole site and talked to construction companies. We talked to some other companies and organisations as well and realised that continuing the construction and putting a 'roof' on the basin would enable us to bring in Industry such as data centres or frozen food warehouses, both heavy users of power, or else build houses and flats on this space . We "did the sums" and these showed overall site development at or about break-even, in other words full recovery of the construction costs, but now with the electricity produced more as a by - product. Indeed we saw a societal benefit as well: if the choice of use "upstairs" is dwellings these could have electricity provided by the tidal electricity, and the insertion of a heat pump into the basin would ensure hot or cold water at all times (effectively air conditioning) making these houses and flats extremely environmentally friendly. More on this later; see the section on environmentally-friendly housing
But really importantly, the general set of cost - to - produce calculations showed that this approach allows us to meet the electricity price target.
By amalgamating tidal power with other construction (and particularly industry) we can make electricity for £50 per megawatt hour.
At this stage we acknowledge help from Balfour Beatty, General Electric (USA: this is a helpful "way in" to them: https://www.ge.com/renewableenergy/hydro-power ) the housebuilders Crest Nicolson, Kvaerner GmbH and Morgan Sindall.
To this list must be added extremely useful dialogue with the UK's leading tidal expert Tony Trapp FREng on the viability of tidal power and studying his report (a Royal Academy of Engineering publication which he authored) on the matter. We fully agree with this report that tidal power on its own is not viable, but joined with (say) data centres built on the roof that can use the large amounts of cold, flowing water in the "power station" section below (as a "heat exchange" medium) it can be profitable as well.
Secondly: Power production "round the clock"
This was essential but it was a lot harder. While the tide is powerful for the middle part of the flow, the movement of water has to slow down in order for it to 'turn around' - an incoming tide has to become an ebb tide. This "in between" period is called by mariners "slack water."
We found out how to do this as well. However our method is subject to patent action and this content is under discussion with our Patent Agents and our Solicitors.
We found out how to do it though......... and it works.
Solving power generation without subsidy and overcoming the turn of the tide problem comprised our principal "technical" research phase and was completed in 2020. We had most help on the way from Balfour Beatty (again), from the Met Office, the National Physical Laboratory and Tata steel, the others as listed above, and wish to record our appreciation and thanks.
How we achieved these aims and what this means
By the end of our technical research phase around five years ago, we concluded that by using otherwise derelict, empty riverside brownfield land, we can construct not only tidal basins that each will produce electricity, from 40 or 50 megawatts up to 400 megawatts (and even more on some sites), but also take heavy electricity users such as data centres off grid by positioning them above these tidal basins and use the turnover of cold water 'down below' as the medium for heat exchanging while using only a small proportion of the tidal power generated and sending the rest into the grid.
Realising this is an important factor, the use of the site for new industrial buildings that utilise the huge turnover of cold water (we used 20,000 tonnes per hour as a working figure) is extremely attractive. Such a high turnover would be of tremendous benefit to data storage or data processing companies who require mammoth amounts of cooling (see section on data storage).
In addition, we can store hundreds of megawatts of power; in due course gigawatts. Again we considered this in more detail (see section on power storage).
Instead of just "building houses".... but houses with free electricity and free air conditioning for life are still an attractive potential use.
This is how it all works:
A little bit more research........
Having established, to our own satisfaction, that tidal could be both feasible and viable, we did some other investigations.
We checked grid connectivity with National Power. As we were able to work around the clock all we needed was grid synchronisation to 50Hz. National Power told us of methods used for "long term intermittent" (such as hydro) but as we had defeated the "turn of the tide" problem and had 24/7 generation standard synchronisation was fine.
A major problem with renewables is the way they have to operate and need to have equipment called "inverters" to supply into the grid. We were aware of grid problems caused by harmonics (both super and supra) generated by inverters through discussions with the electrical power group at the National Physical Laboratory, but given the power levels and the way the AC can be controlled with 'tidal', inverters are not needed. The tide is so predictable a tidal power station can be operated in all ways like any other 24/7 power station and by its size and location on land can add a considerable amount of grid inertia, true "heavy flywheel" operation.
Help was provided here by National Grid itself and by some now-retired former employees of the Charles Parsons turbine factory situated in Heaton, Newcastle. The help on "electrical Q factor" from the National Physical Laboratory was of great value.
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