Not sure if anyone has made this point, but the flexibility issue for nuclear could be entirely solved by putting a Bitcoin mining operation next door. The Bitcoin mining could be scaled up/down to absorb whatever surplus was available.
You can take some pointers from a PhD in electrical engineering and former New York utility manager. Damian Sciano came on my show to talk reality - not ideology or politics - about power generation and distribution. More voices like his and David's need to be heeded.
Great post David. I have just sent the attached to your substack email address in reply to the latest BS From Octopus. I am happy with them as an energy supplier, but they are really dumb in other ways:
Email heading "FYI: Energy prices will fall next week. Your smart tariff details inside"
I am extremely confused by your email and the attached PDF.
I had already read that the price cap was coming down by 7% from July 1st. I know that this is for standard variable rate contracts, but you don't make that clear in your headline.
Your first bullet point states
- Flexible Octopus prices are falling from July 1. Your smart tariff prices are coming down too."
My Flexible smart tariff has NOT changed according to the PDF except for the standing charge which has been reduced by a whole 1.638p/day. Wow. That's just under £8pa on a £1k bill which is .7%, not 7% - a mere order of magnitude different.
The email goes on to say "To help you make the most of the sunshine, your Octopus Flux Import unit rates are staying put" which does not make sense. The only way to "make the most of the sunshine" would be for EXPORT rates to INCREASE, but they have stayed put, just like the IMPORT prices.
Do you think we are all stupid ? Are you conflating standard tariffs with flexible/smart tariffs and implying our prices will fall and hoping that we won't look at the detail and notice there's no change except in the standing charge?
Personally I am happy that the prices are not falling as with the battery I added to my solar system at the start of last year, I am exporting far more than I am importing over the full year so a price drop would reduce my savings, but your email and the PDF seem to be deliberately confusing.
And zonal pricing is a nonsense too. It only makes sense if there are consumers with flexible demand near to the renewable generators to avoid constraint payments, which as you point out is not the case. To save investment in the grid, you expect businesses to spend money to build new facilities near wind farms in the North of the UK. No real saving at all in money or jobs, just who pays. Don't tell me that data centres can open there, because they need high speed fibre and that is not in place either. And what happens to those local businesses when the wind stops blowing - do they mothball the place ?
If there's no nearby flexible market for the power, the wind-farms should not be built there, even if they are the windiest places. When the full cost of connection to the grid and backup for calm days are included, renewables suddenly become much more expensive.
This is like something out of the League of Gentlemen - "local electricity for local people". Green gas-lighting at its worst.
The intelligence and even common sense of ministers and prime minister are responsible for the amount of briefing by permanent civil servants and advisors that are used in policy decisions. Milliband doesn't have either, nor does Rachel from accounts, or their boss. So we have the CC Act, and the last 12 months of Labour policies now being reversed overnight.
This also goes for what laughable passes for 'foreign policy' where the PM and FM go to endless group think meetings with people similarly inept reinforcing Russophobia.
The UK could solve its gas supply problem overnight with long term LNG contracts at reasonable prices from Russia. It won't because.......?
David, excellent article, but please cut out the Russophobia, its rubbish.
Russia is openly hostile to the UK in a way not seen since at least the mutual diplomatic expulsions of 1971. The Russians would argue that we deserve it for our support of Ukraine and for our moral decline as a nation: they would agree with Vance on that.
It is perhaps a historical anomaly that the very first cargo on the Christophe de Margerie from Yamal LNG got diverted to Grain at Christmas to bail the UK out of a tight supply situation in cold weather.
By the mid 70s there was a big thaw in relations including a major increase in trade, and later Thatcher famously described Gorbachev as someone she could do business with. The UK provided considerable support for Russia in WW II via the Arctic convoys. The other extremes have included the Crimean War, the Berlin Airlift, the Cold War.
Thank you for that informative post. As a retired naval officer I do have a good understanding of tidal patterns. By having relatively small installations around the coast one could even out the input into a national grid: HW Plymouth is around 3.5 hours different from HW Aberdeen for example. And opening the sluices could be more nuanced than fully open or fully shut.
However, I can believe that the generated output may not justify the costs.
Angeloudis is probably the current global expert on tidal barrages. This recently published paper includes some interesting observations about tidal dynamics that affect the energy potential of particular schemes: you can get water to pile up against your barrage.
This is extendable to value of outputs and inputs if you assume there are no knock-on effects. However, at La Rance, despite its relatively small size, pumping is mostly banned because it means extra generation to supply it and a bigger difference when generation commences.
One of the interesting findings of the Joule study by the Proudman Institute on tidal was that the major estuarial barrage projects would cause tide timings to change, and most would be in sync rather than filling in the gaps. Again, a point completely missed by e.g. the Hendry Review.
If tidal stream could be made to work economically it might help, but that is a very big if. You are still left with spring/neap variation.
There has been some work done on economic rather than energy optimisation of barrages. You are still subject to the art of the possible from spring/neap variation, and upsetting the timing for one cycle echoes forward through several succeeding ones, making optimisation on a predictive basis a hard problem. You can improve the economics of the project by about 20%, but that excludes the effects on the rest of the grid of doing so. For example, do you curtail wind revenue to allow tidal to generate?
Excellent - thank you David. The current parlous situation (we need new gas-fired generation but can't get it in time so we must keep burning wood) is so far removed from a physics-based approach that I can only assume it results from successful lobbying of politicians by those skilled in pressing the right buttons. Common sense has become such an oxymoron we should drop it in favour of good sense.
An excellent analysis. It is encouraging to note that in the eight months since Trump re-won the presidency, the push for decarbonisation in the USA has “suddenly evaporated overnight” according to Energy Bad Boys: https://energybadboys.substack.com/p/the-energy-vibe-shift-is-real.
Here in the UK, Miliband is doubling down on his anti-physics, anti-engineering fantasy that the country’s power can be supplied mostly by expensive, weather-dependent wind and solar. This has pushed up our energy bills to world-record levels and getting steadily higher.
The government used to publish easy-to-access figures of national fuel poverty but no longer seem to do so, probably because it has become too embarrassing for them. According to ChatGPT, the latest fuel poverty figures are 11% of households in England and a shocking 34% in Scotland, land of a coolish climate ruled by climate change/Net Zero zealots – not just the SNP, the entire Uniparty.
Many people are now in arrears on their energy bills, to an overall total of over £4 billion. Scroll down this Ofgem link on Domestic Customer Debt and Arrears to the “Total financial value” graph of these soaring arrears. It’s even worse for the commercial companies who are managing to stay in business as they have additional “green” levies piled onto their bills. As you can’t get blood out of a stone, this threatens to become a positive feedback loop to disaster if bills have to be raised even higher to pay for unrecoverable arrears: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/debt-and-arrears-indicators.
Meanwhile, establishment lackeys continue to push the untrue narrative that our high energy bills are all because of gas, implying that we should increase the push for renewables. This post from Gordon Hughes debunks the “soundbite” narrative that the price of gas drives the price of electricity: https://cloudwisdom.substack.com/p/what-is-the-link-between-gb-electricity.
I’m sure that Miliband’s 95% grid decarbonisation is an engineering impossibility. In any case it’s all so pointless because the UK’s dependence on fossil fuels for its primary energy supplies is around 75-80% (source ChatGPT), a million miles away from Net Zero, against an even more impossible world 88% dependency in the second Paul Homewood link above.
Why on earth is the Uniparty so determined to pursue their ruinous Net Zero agenda? It looks to me as if it’s because the agenda is set by their globalist overlords, like other unpopular agendas such as the war on free speech (thankfully repudiated by Trump), war on farming, war on cars, mass immigration, unsafe mRNA vaccines, proxy war on Russia (thankfully being spiked by Trump).
Energy abundance is only as good as the use to which it is put surely?
There is a big difference between generating clean energy to power homes and factories and using it to power data centres for frivolous uses of AI.
I can see this in real time in Ireland- the swollen demand for electricity by its massive data centre sector has meant that in rural Ireland the grid frequently falls over..
No, I'm not. Because I don't believe it. Trashing the planet imo to save the planet is completely bonkers. AI is not a magic wand; the solutions are already here, and are not complicated, increased insulation, changing our lifestyles, improved public transport etc.
I worked in IT for many years, I saw at first hand how low tech and simple solutions were always rejected in favor of expensive and complicated ones (and these often are squid ink for power transfers).
Engineers (and I'm one) love 'sweet' solutions, the joy of getting something to work digitally or mechanically - I'm sure I used to get a dopamine hit every time I successfully wired up an internet router or installed a server (long time ago)!
Unfortunately that's our blind spot imo, we cannot see that the easy and simple is often a better solution, because of course, the easy and simple does not require us.
But I'm sure there will be many who disagree......
I agree with you re sweet and simple solutions - I like them too, but I suspect that any business that ignores the possibilities of Ai improving their operations would be just as foolish as any business that ignored the potential of the internet in the 1990s or electricity in the 1890s.
Thank you for your reply. I agree, business does need to engage with new technology….but AI is not just an amplifier of existing abilities as the electricity and the internet were. AI imo is qualitatively different, and I’m not against thoughtful and targeted uses of it.
But we introduced smartphones without any consideration of the downstream mental health effects on children. AI imo has the same potential for widespread societal harm and we are taking the word of the same tech companies that it will provide more benefits than harm. Call me cynical but I don’t trust Zuckerberg and co anymore…
Excellent post. David. I can’t believe anyone could actually believe that offshore wind power has a meaningful future. Costs are very high and the operating environment is very difficult. The Danish Baltic Sea is the only exception I am aware of, with brackish, sheltered waters, and shallow water depths. The Atlantic and the North Sea are horrible places for offshore wind power.
There are two kinds of tidal. Tidal barrages, like La Rance and Lake Sihwa and the Bay of Fundy have not been replicated elsewhere for two main reasons: cost and intermittency, with environmental impact a further concern. The small projects that did get built had the advantage of not needing much barrage investment to enclose the basin. La Rance provides a 1km 4 lane bridge between St Malo and Dinard that avoids a lengthy trip upstream to the next bridge, which provides a lot of the economic justification. Most of the width is taken by the turbines and sluices. When you need to build a lot of breakwater to enclose the tidal basin the costs rise quickly, and the extent of environmental problems rise to match.
Tidal intermittency comes in two main flavours: the ~12 hour 25 minute cycle between high tides that results from the lunar and solar orbits, and the (half) lunar month cycle of spring and neap tides that vary the output of a barrage by the best part of an order of magnitude. That element is predictable, but also means predictably you end up with no output when you need it most, or full output when you need it least. Moreover, the output is at a maximum shortly after you open the wicket gates to start generating having waited for the basin and sea levels to diverge optimally, and then declines to a trickle before you close them again to await the next cycle. Such a profile is difficult for the grid to accommodate: you have to have other generation you can switch off or curtail when generation starts, and can replace the declining output from the barrage as the tide progresses. This chart illustrates those problems:
Incidentally a recent ESNZ Select Committee oral evidence session failed to touch on these points at all.
The other flavour, accounting for all the current UK projects is tidal stream generation. This suffers from similar problems of tidal intermittency, but the biggest problems come from the mode of operation, which is effectively similar to a wind turbine rather that a hydro turbine. Energy output is proportional to the swept area, but attempts to increase blade diameters to achieve better economies of scale have been largely unsuccessful because the underwater gradient of flow speeds plus the wrenching effects of surface wave action affecting upper layers mean that the blades undergo extreme and randomised stresses. Far from being long lived, these conditions wreck larger turbines in short order. Even when not wrecked, they produce very flickery output. The projects in Orkney and Shetland are not permitted to connect directly to the local grid: instead they produce via batteries that can handle the variable output with the part that is charging. That's an added cost and loss of output. In Orkney, they also toy with using output to make hydrogen, which is another very expensive boondoggle. So for now the projects are limited by uneconomic turbine size: it's actually very hard to see that changing much, as they've had decades to try to solve the problems already. The current projects are high cost and very small.
They don't, and it's a good point. But LCOE costs do not considered with renewables either. As for nuclear, the whole issue of waste disposal is somewhat complicated, and the future of advanced SMRs will have a huge impact if they become successful, because they can re-use 'waste' from earlier reactors, reducing the final end waste radioactive products by 10X.
LCOE costs for nuclear typically do include decomm costs. Interestingly, offshore wind LCOE calculations do not. Not sure whether decomm costs are included in the Hinkley C CfD or not.
Incredibly frustrating. The minister for energy doesn't have to be a STEM graduate, he just has to have the common sense that God gave most of us and not be totally wrapped up in the ineffably stupid Westminster bubble.
Why doesn't Ed talk to a few real experts? I guess he's too dumb and lazy to bother, unless foreign travel is involved.
Alas, you won't get through to Mad Ed and the rest of the climate crisis morons with this thoughtful, rational and persuasive line of argument. They will just say:
"Renewables deployment IS a Physics First energy policy. Basic physics means that the more carbon we emit, the hotter it gets. Tackling the climate crisis is THE most important aspect of any modern energy policy. Shut up and get a smart meter and heat pump and sign up to a time of use tariff."
I'm amazed it takes the UK 8 years to produce a Gas power station. South Korea has consistently produced working Nuclear plants in 5 years
Not sure if anyone has made this point, but the flexibility issue for nuclear could be entirely solved by putting a Bitcoin mining operation next door. The Bitcoin mining could be scaled up/down to absorb whatever surplus was available.
David, I've used the numbers you give in Figure 4 to calculate a first attempt at a Power Suitability Index here: https://cliscep.com/2025/06/29/power-suitability-index-v-1-0/
Interesting idea.
You can take some pointers from a PhD in electrical engineering and former New York utility manager. Damian Sciano came on my show to talk reality - not ideology or politics - about power generation and distribution. More voices like his and David's need to be heeded.
https://rumble.com/v6u1pfh-electrical-utility-engineer-discusses-the-objective-reality-of-power-genera.html
The GIGO lie of climate science.
Garbage in – 1
GHE theory claims without it Earth would be 33 C colder becoming a -18 C ice ball.
Garbage in – 2
Ubiquitous GHE heat balance graphics violate GAAP & both LoT 1 & 2.
Garbage in – 3
GHE theory claims Earth upwells as a BB creating “extra” energy out of thin air violating LoT 1 & back radiation violating LoT 2.
= Garbage out
Mankind’s CO2 adversely affects the thermal behavior of the atmosphere.
GHE = Bogus & CAGW = scam.
Great post David. I have just sent the attached to your substack email address in reply to the latest BS From Octopus. I am happy with them as an energy supplier, but they are really dumb in other ways:
Email heading "FYI: Energy prices will fall next week. Your smart tariff details inside"
I am extremely confused by your email and the attached PDF.
I had already read that the price cap was coming down by 7% from July 1st. I know that this is for standard variable rate contracts, but you don't make that clear in your headline.
Your first bullet point states
- Flexible Octopus prices are falling from July 1. Your smart tariff prices are coming down too."
My Flexible smart tariff has NOT changed according to the PDF except for the standing charge which has been reduced by a whole 1.638p/day. Wow. That's just under £8pa on a £1k bill which is .7%, not 7% - a mere order of magnitude different.
The email goes on to say "To help you make the most of the sunshine, your Octopus Flux Import unit rates are staying put" which does not make sense. The only way to "make the most of the sunshine" would be for EXPORT rates to INCREASE, but they have stayed put, just like the IMPORT prices.
Do you think we are all stupid ? Are you conflating standard tariffs with flexible/smart tariffs and implying our prices will fall and hoping that we won't look at the detail and notice there's no change except in the standing charge?
Personally I am happy that the prices are not falling as with the battery I added to my solar system at the start of last year, I am exporting far more than I am importing over the full year so a price drop would reduce my savings, but your email and the PDF seem to be deliberately confusing.
And zonal pricing is a nonsense too. It only makes sense if there are consumers with flexible demand near to the renewable generators to avoid constraint payments, which as you point out is not the case. To save investment in the grid, you expect businesses to spend money to build new facilities near wind farms in the North of the UK. No real saving at all in money or jobs, just who pays. Don't tell me that data centres can open there, because they need high speed fibre and that is not in place either. And what happens to those local businesses when the wind stops blowing - do they mothball the place ?
If there's no nearby flexible market for the power, the wind-farms should not be built there, even if they are the windiest places. When the full cost of connection to the grid and backup for calm days are included, renewables suddenly become much more expensive.
This is like something out of the League of Gentlemen - "local electricity for local people". Green gas-lighting at its worst.
The intelligence and even common sense of ministers and prime minister are responsible for the amount of briefing by permanent civil servants and advisors that are used in policy decisions. Milliband doesn't have either, nor does Rachel from accounts, or their boss. So we have the CC Act, and the last 12 months of Labour policies now being reversed overnight.
This also goes for what laughable passes for 'foreign policy' where the PM and FM go to endless group think meetings with people similarly inept reinforcing Russophobia.
The UK could solve its gas supply problem overnight with long term LNG contracts at reasonable prices from Russia. It won't because.......?
David, excellent article, but please cut out the Russophobia, its rubbish.
Russia is openly hostile to the UK in a way not seen since at least the mutual diplomatic expulsions of 1971. The Russians would argue that we deserve it for our support of Ukraine and for our moral decline as a nation: they would agree with Vance on that.
It is perhaps a historical anomaly that the very first cargo on the Christophe de Margerie from Yamal LNG got diverted to Grain at Christmas to bail the UK out of a tight supply situation in cold weather.
The UK is openly hostile to Russia since about 1820. Give or take a year or two in the early 40s.
Doesn't stop anyone doing good business. People should grow up.
By the mid 70s there was a big thaw in relations including a major increase in trade, and later Thatcher famously described Gorbachev as someone she could do business with. The UK provided considerable support for Russia in WW II via the Arctic convoys. The other extremes have included the Crimean War, the Berlin Airlift, the Cold War.
The relationship has been variable.
Thank you for that informative post. As a retired naval officer I do have a good understanding of tidal patterns. By having relatively small installations around the coast one could even out the input into a national grid: HW Plymouth is around 3.5 hours different from HW Aberdeen for example. And opening the sluices could be more nuanced than fully open or fully shut.
However, I can believe that the generated output may not justify the costs.
Perhaps only small, local schemes are viable.
https://www.elingexperience.co.uk/
Angeloudis is probably the current global expert on tidal barrages. This recently published paper includes some interesting observations about tidal dynamics that affect the energy potential of particular schemes: you can get water to pile up against your barrage.
https://www.pure.ed.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/475186771/revised.pdf
He has also looked at features such as tidal storm surges that make the output slightly less predictable.
Here he discusses optimisation methodology including pumping to enhance water levels at either end of a tide
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321777097_Optimising_tidal_range_power_plant_operation
This is extendable to value of outputs and inputs if you assume there are no knock-on effects. However, at La Rance, despite its relatively small size, pumping is mostly banned because it means extra generation to supply it and a bigger difference when generation commences.
One of the interesting findings of the Joule study by the Proudman Institute on tidal was that the major estuarial barrage projects would cause tide timings to change, and most would be in sync rather than filling in the gaps. Again, a point completely missed by e.g. the Hendry Review.
https://euanmearns.com/green-mythology-tidal-base-load-power-in-the-uk/
If tidal stream could be made to work economically it might help, but that is a very big if. You are still left with spring/neap variation.
There has been some work done on economic rather than energy optimisation of barrages. You are still subject to the art of the possible from spring/neap variation, and upsetting the timing for one cycle echoes forward through several succeeding ones, making optimisation on a predictive basis a hard problem. You can improve the economics of the project by about 20%, but that excludes the effects on the rest of the grid of doing so. For example, do you curtail wind revenue to allow tidal to generate?
Excellent - thank you David. The current parlous situation (we need new gas-fired generation but can't get it in time so we must keep burning wood) is so far removed from a physics-based approach that I can only assume it results from successful lobbying of politicians by those skilled in pressing the right buttons. Common sense has become such an oxymoron we should drop it in favour of good sense.
An excellent analysis. It is encouraging to note that in the eight months since Trump re-won the presidency, the push for decarbonisation in the USA has “suddenly evaporated overnight” according to Energy Bad Boys: https://energybadboys.substack.com/p/the-energy-vibe-shift-is-real.
Here in the UK, Miliband is doubling down on his anti-physics, anti-engineering fantasy that the country’s power can be supplied mostly by expensive, weather-dependent wind and solar. This has pushed up our energy bills to world-record levels and getting steadily higher.
The government used to publish easy-to-access figures of national fuel poverty but no longer seem to do so, probably because it has become too embarrassing for them. According to ChatGPT, the latest fuel poverty figures are 11% of households in England and a shocking 34% in Scotland, land of a coolish climate ruled by climate change/Net Zero zealots – not just the SNP, the entire Uniparty.
Many people are now in arrears on their energy bills, to an overall total of over £4 billion. Scroll down this Ofgem link on Domestic Customer Debt and Arrears to the “Total financial value” graph of these soaring arrears. It’s even worse for the commercial companies who are managing to stay in business as they have additional “green” levies piled onto their bills. As you can’t get blood out of a stone, this threatens to become a positive feedback loop to disaster if bills have to be raised even higher to pay for unrecoverable arrears: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/debt-and-arrears-indicators.
Meanwhile, establishment lackeys continue to push the untrue narrative that our high energy bills are all because of gas, implying that we should increase the push for renewables. This post from Gordon Hughes debunks the “soundbite” narrative that the price of gas drives the price of electricity: https://cloudwisdom.substack.com/p/what-is-the-link-between-gb-electricity.
Further to the pointlessness of unilateral UK Net Zero, the latest Energy Institute Energy Review confirms what we have known for years, that the world as a whole is not interested in pursuing Net Zero as summarised in two posts from Paul Homewood: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2025/06/26/bp-energy-review-2024/ and https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2025/06/28/energy-institute-energy-review/.
I’m sure that Miliband’s 95% grid decarbonisation is an engineering impossibility. In any case it’s all so pointless because the UK’s dependence on fossil fuels for its primary energy supplies is around 75-80% (source ChatGPT), a million miles away from Net Zero, against an even more impossible world 88% dependency in the second Paul Homewood link above.
Why on earth is the Uniparty so determined to pursue their ruinous Net Zero agenda? It looks to me as if it’s because the agenda is set by their globalist overlords, like other unpopular agendas such as the war on free speech (thankfully repudiated by Trump), war on farming, war on cars, mass immigration, unsafe mRNA vaccines, proxy war on Russia (thankfully being spiked by Trump).
This is a fascinating and thoughtful essay. But imo there is an omission- what about the demand side?
Jevons paradox means that any efficiencies in generation might end up mopped up by data centres?
https://www.ipeg.com/jevons-paradox-and-ai-the-deepseek-disruption/
Energy abundance is only as good as the use to which it is put surely?
There is a big difference between generating clean energy to power homes and factories and using it to power data centres for frivolous uses of AI.
I can see this in real time in Ireland- the swollen demand for electricity by its massive data centre sector has meant that in rural Ireland the grid frequently falls over..
Not to mention the demand for water….
You seem to be missing the potential of Ai for huge improvements in efficiency in the very homes and factories that you mention.
No, I'm not. Because I don't believe it. Trashing the planet imo to save the planet is completely bonkers. AI is not a magic wand; the solutions are already here, and are not complicated, increased insulation, changing our lifestyles, improved public transport etc.
I worked in IT for many years, I saw at first hand how low tech and simple solutions were always rejected in favor of expensive and complicated ones (and these often are squid ink for power transfers).
Engineers (and I'm one) love 'sweet' solutions, the joy of getting something to work digitally or mechanically - I'm sure I used to get a dopamine hit every time I successfully wired up an internet router or installed a server (long time ago)!
Unfortunately that's our blind spot imo, we cannot see that the easy and simple is often a better solution, because of course, the easy and simple does not require us.
But I'm sure there will be many who disagree......
I agree with you re sweet and simple solutions - I like them too, but I suspect that any business that ignores the possibilities of Ai improving their operations would be just as foolish as any business that ignored the potential of the internet in the 1990s or electricity in the 1890s.
Thank you for your reply. I agree, business does need to engage with new technology….but AI is not just an amplifier of existing abilities as the electricity and the internet were. AI imo is qualitatively different, and I’m not against thoughtful and targeted uses of it.
But we introduced smartphones without any consideration of the downstream mental health effects on children. AI imo has the same potential for widespread societal harm and we are taking the word of the same tech companies that it will provide more benefits than harm. Call me cynical but I don’t trust Zuckerberg and co anymore…
I am not sure what you mean.
Energy abundance is surely a good thing. If we get more efficient at producing energy, demand will rise. In which case we build more.
Excellent post. David. I can’t believe anyone could actually believe that offshore wind power has a meaningful future. Costs are very high and the operating environment is very difficult. The Danish Baltic Sea is the only exception I am aware of, with brackish, sheltered waters, and shallow water depths. The Atlantic and the North Sea are horrible places for offshore wind power.
I've always liked tidal as a concept - it's just horizontal hydro after all - and, although time variable, it's completely predictable.
I'm surprised its cost is so high. I can see it takes a lot of concrete but its lifetime is far longer than any of the other generating technologies.
How have the tidal scheme promoters managed to get such a high strike price in AR6?
There are two kinds of tidal. Tidal barrages, like La Rance and Lake Sihwa and the Bay of Fundy have not been replicated elsewhere for two main reasons: cost and intermittency, with environmental impact a further concern. The small projects that did get built had the advantage of not needing much barrage investment to enclose the basin. La Rance provides a 1km 4 lane bridge between St Malo and Dinard that avoids a lengthy trip upstream to the next bridge, which provides a lot of the economic justification. Most of the width is taken by the turbines and sluices. When you need to build a lot of breakwater to enclose the tidal basin the costs rise quickly, and the extent of environmental problems rise to match.
Tidal intermittency comes in two main flavours: the ~12 hour 25 minute cycle between high tides that results from the lunar and solar orbits, and the (half) lunar month cycle of spring and neap tides that vary the output of a barrage by the best part of an order of magnitude. That element is predictable, but also means predictably you end up with no output when you need it most, or full output when you need it least. Moreover, the output is at a maximum shortly after you open the wicket gates to start generating having waited for the basin and sea levels to diverge optimally, and then declines to a trickle before you close them again to await the next cycle. Such a profile is difficult for the grid to accommodate: you have to have other generation you can switch off or curtail when generation starts, and can replace the declining output from the barrage as the tide progresses. This chart illustrates those problems:
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/D0N7k/2/
Incidentally a recent ESNZ Select Committee oral evidence session failed to touch on these points at all.
The other flavour, accounting for all the current UK projects is tidal stream generation. This suffers from similar problems of tidal intermittency, but the biggest problems come from the mode of operation, which is effectively similar to a wind turbine rather that a hydro turbine. Energy output is proportional to the swept area, but attempts to increase blade diameters to achieve better economies of scale have been largely unsuccessful because the underwater gradient of flow speeds plus the wrenching effects of surface wave action affecting upper layers mean that the blades undergo extreme and randomised stresses. Far from being long lived, these conditions wreck larger turbines in short order. Even when not wrecked, they produce very flickery output. The projects in Orkney and Shetland are not permitted to connect directly to the local grid: instead they produce via batteries that can handle the variable output with the part that is charging. That's an added cost and loss of output. In Orkney, they also toy with using output to make hydrogen, which is another very expensive boondoggle. So for now the projects are limited by uneconomic turbine size: it's actually very hard to see that changing much, as they've had decades to try to solve the problems already. The current projects are high cost and very small.
I am curious to know if the nuclear costs contain the not inconsiderable costs of decommissioning and waste disposal and long term storage?
They don't, and it's a good point. But LCOE costs do not considered with renewables either. As for nuclear, the whole issue of waste disposal is somewhat complicated, and the future of advanced SMRs will have a huge impact if they become successful, because they can re-use 'waste' from earlier reactors, reducing the final end waste radioactive products by 10X.
LCOE costs for nuclear typically do include decomm costs. Interestingly, offshore wind LCOE calculations do not. Not sure whether decomm costs are included in the Hinkley C CfD or not.
Incredibly frustrating. The minister for energy doesn't have to be a STEM graduate, he just has to have the common sense that God gave most of us and not be totally wrapped up in the ineffably stupid Westminster bubble.
Why doesn't Ed talk to a few real experts? I guess he's too dumb and lazy to bother, unless foreign travel is involved.
Alas, you won't get through to Mad Ed and the rest of the climate crisis morons with this thoughtful, rational and persuasive line of argument. They will just say:
"Renewables deployment IS a Physics First energy policy. Basic physics means that the more carbon we emit, the hotter it gets. Tackling the climate crisis is THE most important aspect of any modern energy policy. Shut up and get a smart meter and heat pump and sign up to a time of use tariff."