A tidal turbine in the Pentland Firth has been in operation for over six years – tidal is a part of the utopian technological solution package for the environmental crisis, so let’s cut through this piece of commerical PR for a bit of a reality check:

  • The Pentland installation has four turbines, so I guess the other three required maintance since their installation (reportedly the site underwent ‘major turbine repair and maintenance in the first half of 2023’),
  • The 6MW capacity of the four turnbine intallation is inconsequential (the project has been on the go for a decade, the site was supposed to have been upgraded to 10MW by 2020, and later to 86MW – the dates for the latter upgrade seem to have gone missing, but according to this piece from 2018, this was supposed to happen by 2021),
  • Tidal is not exactly new, tidal power stations have been around since 1960s (Rance in France, will mark it’s 60th birthday next year), but nobody has managed to scale this technology above ~250MW.

And last, but not least, as with all ‘renewables’, it is not possible to extract large amounts of energy from an ecosystem without effecting a material change in it. This issue is only talked about when it affects the renewables commercial operations (e.g., a windfarm stealing wind from a neighbouring one), but the fundamental costs are, necessarily, ecological. Renewables are, on the most basic level, mining operations, and need to be treated as such, i.e., with utmost caution. (And, as is normal in the UK, the ecological costs are being pushed into Scotland first.)

While (small scale) renewables have an important role to play in the future, yet again, there is no fix for the environmental collapse we are causing without a drastic cut to our energy consumption. Large scale renewables are a part of the Great Delusion that life can go on more or less the same, because technology alone will save us.