(c) EMEC
You’ve probably seen this already, but I thought I’d connect it to the wider and longer story of Scottish renewables. See links below.
From Energy Voice yesterday and reported accurately by Reporting Scotland (!):
‘Scotrenewables Tidal Power said its SR2000 device, launched in 2016, had clocked up three gigawatt hours (GWhs) of electricity in its first year of testing at the European Marine Energy Centre (Emec). It has survived harsh winter storms to supply the equivalent annual electricity demand of around 830 UK households. At times, it has covered more than a quarter of Orkney’s electricity demand. In May 2018, a report from the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult said that the tidal stream industry could generate a net cumulative benefit to the UK of £1.4 billion, including considerable exports, and support 4,000 jobs by 2030.’
Just a few of the recent reports here on renewables in Scotland:
62% increase in Scottish community renewables projects since 2011 pushing well ahead of rUK
8% of the population and 25% of UK renewable generation.
World’s first renewables-powered hydrogen ferry to be built in Port Glasgow
Scotland surges toward 100% renewables electricity generation well ahead of target
South East Asia can learn much from Scotland’s oil and renewables story
300 renewable energy jobs boom for North of Scotland expected at Nigg Energy Park
Scotland rushing toward 100% electricity supply from renewables by 2020
Talking-up Scotland 
Wonderful news. I noted that even the BBC had a wee positve piece about this yesterday.
I’m convinced that tidal power generation has a huge future in this country. It has a constancy and predictability that’s denied to wind power and with the development of hydrogen storage the two will make up a very large source of wealth for Scotland.
At the risk of boring folk, may I mention a development in hydrogen storage I came across the other day. It involves the use of ammonia as a holder of hydrogen (its chemical formula is made up of three parts hydrogen to one of nitrogen). Ammonia can be stored as a liquid at much lower pressures than hydrogen itself and its production is well established technology. Recent research has found a way to relase the hydrogen from the ammonia at low cost so perhaps we may be filling the tanks of our fuel-cell electric cars with liquid ammonia sooner than we might imagine.
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Not at all boring. Interesting addition.
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I have said this on this site several times before: when I was at school, just before taking my Highers, the Physics department used to arrange a series of talks from various academics on ‘physics’ topics. One was about tidal power – creating a chain of generators which would extract energy from the tide between Barra Head and the coast of Northern Ireland, using the electricity on site, to electrolyse seawater, to produce hydrogen and to pipe this ashore. That was 1965 and the theory was feasible then! In the interim the technologies for generation have improved and ways of transporting hydrogen have changed, but the fact that it was feasible more than 50 years ago, but was not proceeded with suggests political opposition. There was a further bonus to Scottish manufacturing in that, because the Atlantic was a ‘hostile’ environment, the equipment would corrode (because of the saltiness of the air and the rainfall) and would have to be replaced regularly, this would have provided continuous manufacturing work for the dhipyards on the Clyde – we had quite a lot of them in these days and a large, skilled workforce.
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Again I offer thanks to a post across on Wings for drawing my attention to the interesting work by a Swiss company – looks like it could have real potential to help store sustainable electricity to even peaks and troughs in sustainable generation – see snippet and link below:
Borrowing from pumped hydro energy storage principles, a Swiss startup is building energy storage systems using concrete blocks and cranes instead of water and dams. The low cost innovation uses allows the storage of excess energy by using it to power cranes to lift massive concrete blocks. When the energy grid requires additional power, the blocks descend, powering energy turbines that flow into the grid. While the towers require significantly more space than lithium batteries per kilowatt hour, they last longer and can be made of garbage and other recycled materials that do not pose similar difficulties as chemical batteries. Depending on the continued development of battery technology, this concrete tower power bank technology could be a solution to areas with an abundance of land and cheap building materials.
Source: Swiss startup Energy Vault is stacking concrete blocks to store energy — Quartz
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Apologies – pressing wrong keys on PC today and losing stuff. Managed to give a link to the (short) article about the Swiss company developing cranes and concrete towers to store surplus sustainable electricity generation to smooth out peaks and troughs – hopefully this link will work.
https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surprisingly-efficient-way-to-store-energy/
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