Orkney 3. EMEC Tidal Power | Fully Charged

[Music] hello and welcome to another episode of fully-charged this is our third episode from the amazing islands of Orkney in Scotland where thanks to the drive and determination of some of the Islanders the foresight of the Scottish government and the EU emic the European Marine Energy Centre have created a world-leading test center for all things tidal power now we've already covered an affordable housing estate on opening and the surf and turf project that both make very smart use of excess renewable electricity this time we get up close with the innovative designs that are already helping to power those schemes creating huge amounts of clean electricity and helping companies from all over the world test out their latest tidal power generating concepts this could be a glimpse into the future of tidal power generation so Danny I've heard so much about tidal turbines but and I've seen them on Doc's eyes but I've never actually seen one in in-situ doing its job it's really exciting so tell me a bit about Scot renewables are you totally focused on tidal turbines then so Scot renewables em was formed locally and about 2002 and from then until 2003 to 2009 they developed scale models of flow and tidal turbines the company's ethos was to develop a turbine that has low maintenance costs and which resulted in a flow entitled turbine with retractable legs the developed of scale models all the way through and 2011 we launched the SR 250 250 kilowatt device and that ran a successful test program here at emic and then last year we launched the world's largest and most powerful tidal turbine there's our mm which has been going through operational trials and generate and here at the Falls are walnuts right so because what it looks like is it like it does look like a yellow submarine's it's just come out the water isn't it but so that is a how long is that so it's at 64 meters long and it weighs about 505 tons roughly underneath the water rush an awful lot you can't see here yeah but there's two huge retractable Lakes and with rubbish on the end so what the turbine does then as a modular gravity anchor system on the seabed and that's brought up internet that has the electricity cable connection as well and the turbine can go into the tide I so the turbine just literally swings whichever way the tides turning yeah so we can see that now all it's like what are here and what just end in the flood tide and about to come under they have died so you can see the turbines actually Tarman and the end of they've tied so I mean one of the advantages of tidal is of course you can predict when it's going to be generating and when it's going to be turning so it I mean it's presumably tides are every 12 hours roughly ion yeah well but when you look at the scales you can predict for it I think it's just about 18 years or how far you can predict I am which makes it quite useful if you were freedom but electricity suppliers and then how much does that produce them you know in water what's the ratio now that's a 2 megawatt a device negawatt so so that's like a Rick one of the really big wind turbine yeah because it's huge and the turbine had a big power a few weeks ago yeah and it's been generate and well here and the company is sleeping into a press release and it just announced how well it's right how much it's been doing yes fantastic so I mean the potential for this just this single site you know if if the technology was deployed is colossal and it is colossal sort of you know it's multiple gigawatts you could do if you have a you know you've got one here there's doing two megawatts but I mean if you had a thousand done think it would slow the tide somehow no I don't I don't think it would and at a head of s device as well we're developing the engineer of development and Utah by a fluke project as well so and so do you think you could go bigger though is that is that one of the plans that you get bigger bed wouldn't be beggar two megawatts us it's a sizable timeline but we're still looking at reducing the levelized cost of electricity and make it more easy ease of maintenance because is that one of the advantages of having a floating one is that you can you can do maintenance on it I mean I was presumably one it's just here you don't need to necessarily take it into a dog completely installation costs as well as maintenance we can take a team of guys out here and on a rep and they can access the turbine to do any diagnostics and then you can throw it on and off-site with locally available multi-car missiles right which saves it seriously need to forget any dudes they don't crane but I'm assuming then if it's got really big arms down underneath the water with big rotors you do need a very deep port or as they well know the legs are retractable as well so and we can put it into the we call a survivability mode or transportation mode so it reduces the draft so then it's more like a ship rather than a great big thing with big legs completely and also it would be through through transportation if we had to tow the device off site but also F work there was going to be a storm with MUC the huge waves coming through say we could top the legs off to reduce ablative load in the air right so also presumably then this sort of technology is really suited to dr. island communities being able to tell the devices are all as well you can have it any smaller part that has smaller infrastructure and service of all vessels right looks a lot easier I didn't want to see loads of them yes sir quit suddenly do totally for sure [Music] so Lisa we're out in a tidal gap between some islands and it's so confusing is when you look at this installation it really looks like that's moving no that is stationary just now that's the tides that you're seeing flowing past it and it's only just started so that it will build up stronger than that yeah this is just the start of the tide it'll get up to about 4 meters for a second when you look at that thing it's just too big posters some stuff on the top sticking out to sea but there is a thing underneath the way the tidal turbine underneath the floor which is generating electricity into the National Grid as we speak and this is a strike which the company open hydro used to taste their turbine so it allows them to raise the tyrant and it out of the water so when they need to do maintenance or switch the new turbine and a man Li was on to easily pick the turbine into the water to taste it and generate electricity this taste trick here is for the purposes of emic and for tasting the turbine and they've got a sexy meter turbine here the ones that they're developing elsewhere across the world are 16 meters in diameter and they would be deployed on a gravity base on the seabed obviously so they wouldn't use this system or when they're actually installing them for you so this is just a test when they're deployed elsewhere you wouldn't see them from the surface at all so that's City make substation that you can see behind us here which is what wood connects us into the National Grid feed power back to the mainland of Scotland today we have four different tidal turbines on site aim two of which are visible which you saw over the floating turbines behind us a one which is open hydro one that's on the seabed here and there's another turbine that's deployed on the seabed or all aboard and also to believe you that's there that's amazing so then that that power is going under on cables to the substation there you mate provides we've got seven subsea cables here at the tidal taste site which feed into the substation sure you won't have an opinion about this but do you feel that that tidal turbines have a have a stronger possibility of becoming widely used more than wave or is it really you cannot really judge between the two I would say title energy is further hate in its development at the moment aim but in terms of the potential across the world wave energy is the one that has the most resource out there across the world we got far away there's room for both technologies out there are we getting close to sort of genuine commercial deployment in around the world so this platform here behind us has been here for 10 years now so this company have been tasting various iterations of their turbine and keep on bringing new ones back to TST make whilst they go out and start looking at commercial developments across the world it's quite early days for the industry where it's still in its infancy and a lot of these technologies are first and second generations technologies and it will be with me a couple of decades before we really start to see this being bail out but this is this is the start of it so II make was set up with a lot of public funding coming from the Scottish Government and the UK government as well as some European funding coming in as well and it was that foresight coming from the public sector which was really instrumental in getting you next set up here I'm getting this the infrastructure in place to allow technologies to taste in real sea conditions and that's been the instigator for a whole new industry to start to develop and Orkney Act is a really good case study for those benefits that can come out of developing this industry I'm almost surprised by the foresight of government funding that you know that this was initially put in before there were really any tidal turbines I mean it was the notion that there might be all that technology might work to put these installations in because it's been here quite a while I think as you see that that forestay from government is so important in terms of instigating innovation that's now taking place on-site these are extremely pioneering machines that are being tasted here in the UK and that's because of that foresight that came from government the very early days I mean it kind of makes sense because we were an island nation with a lot of tides around us it's sort of its kind of obvious when you think about it in those terms I mean we're a maritime nation and that's what a lot of our past industries have been bailed on and this is a new industry that we can build on a lot of the skills that we already have but build up a new industry around that particularly the oil and gas industry which for decades has been putting big things in the sea to extract fossil fuels I mean there in a sense there's some similarities there's some technological similarities with this and there there's definitely some transferrable skills we can get from oil and gas and from onshore and offshore wind as well we can take a lot of that learning a lot of the learning from the shipbuilding bees as well comes into this no very obvious from looking at that that there's a lot of water moving through you through this channel so there's about half a billion tons of what are compassed through the fall of one s everyoe are at peak tide so four meters per second over eight notes it's like running yes we dove running isn't it because it's very hard to tell we are we're on a boat here that is actually having to work even though we're not moving just to keep level wasn't it s extraordinary what surprises a lot of people when they see pictures of the boats being stationary earth the platform of the earth this is all stationary and the water yeah and there's some ties that's running fast there we'd like to thank Lisa and Danny and all the amazing people of Orkney who showed us the groundbreaking and inspirational work that's happening on these beautiful Scottish islands please subscribe to fully charged and check out the patreon link beneath this video and if you have been as always thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: Fully Charged Show

Views: 114,581

Rating: 4.9694009 out of 5

Keywords: Fully Charged Show, Fully Charged, electric car, electric vehicles, electric bikes, hydrogen fuel cell, 2040, bio gas, smart grid, micro grid, renewable energy, sustainable development, solar panels, solar, solar PV, solar power, wind turbines, offshore wind, battery, storage, Robert Llewellyn, Red Dwarf, Scrapheap Challenge, internal combustion, diesel, fossil fuel, oil, refinery, tidal power, tidal turbines, eco power

Id: YEQQl-qpkCc

Length: 11min 39sec (699 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 06 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/jakeycunt]

The sea bed is a tough environment. None of them are withstanding the corrosion at the moment.