Occidental societies are built on superlatives. Higher is better: Skyscrapers. Faster is better: airplanes. Simpler is better: Minimalistic touchless cellphones. Hopefully, there are other adages, like be average and get adaptable.
It works as good as it gets. Wrap this around this tidal stream turbine. With its 4MW output, it’s not the most productive one. It’s not the cheapest one too. But still, it’s a good one. It self adapts to streams and doesn’t require maintenance.
In fact, TidalStream, the engineering company behind the generator, designed it to be used in offshore waters. Its concept consists of anchoring some floating tidal stream turbines into a heavy, medium-size base. The tether is expandable depending on the depth. Every flow modification will just move the generator instead of bouncing it.
Such a scheme is smart. For comparison, a wind turbine with a 100-meter diameter rotor captures the same energy at a 10 m/s hub height wind speed. But in the same time, the turbine will need a gravity base to 25% larger than the tidal turbine base. So it’s less impressive, but works as well.
The first park of these turbines will be anchored 60 meters under water, in Pentland Firth, between Northern Scotland and the Orkney Islands.
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