2013 Press Releases
Tidal turbines to generate Scottish electricity?
Tidal turbines stretched across Pentland Firth, which separates the Orkney Islands from mainland Scotland, could generate almost half of Scotland's electricity needs.
A new study, co-authored by Professor Alistair Borthwick, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in UCC and researchers from Oxford University and the University of Western Australia, provides the first reliable estimate of the maximum energy that could be generated from Pentland Firth, Scotland. The 1.9GW figure is considerably lower than some early estimates as it takes into account factors such as how many tidal turbines it would be feasible to build, how a series of turbines would interact with each other, and averages out variations caused by the fortnightly and seasonal cycle of the tides.
The new calculations suggest that the prospects of extracting the first 500 megawatts (MW) of energy are very promising. Due to the increasing difficulty of extracting more and more energy towards the maximum of 1.9GW, the researchers believe that a target of extracting 1GW is realistic.
Dr Thomas Adcock of Oxford University's Department of Engineering Science, lead author of the report, said: “Pentland Firth promises to be one of the best sites in the world for tidal power. What our research shows is that it could potentially generate power equivalent to almost half of Scotland's annual electricity consumption.”
The work was commissioned and supported by the Energy Technologies Institute. A report of the research, entitled 'The available power from tidal stream turbines in the Pentland Firth', is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A.
The research was a carried out by Dr Thomas Adcock, Professor Guy Houlsby and Sena Serhadioğlu of Oxford University's Department of Engineering Science, Professor Alistair Borthwick of University College Cork and Assistant Professor Scott Draper of the University of Western Australia.