Tidal range is a significant low-carbon domestic, sovereign generation opportunity for the UK, offering energy security at scale.
Tidal Range
How Tidal Range Works
Tidal range requires an embankment (via a barrage or lagoon) that captures potential energy and, as the tide ebbs and floods generators within the lagoon or barrage, generates electricity. Tidal range is very efficient, as large lagoons and barrages capture considerable amounts of energy.
What Does Tidal Range Bring to the UK?
Tidal range offers timetabled, non-weather-dependent generation from long-term assets with a 120-year operational lifetime. With a huge indigenous resource in the UK, and with no other renewable technology offering these characteristics, the UK government must focus on how to unlock this proven technology and advance this impactful industry.
Tidal range has multiple benefits:
• Mature and proven technology- already built in La Rance, France, 1966 & Sihwa, South Korea, 2011
• Non-weather-dependent
• Long-term asset
• Timetabled, predictable and reliable energy generation
• Generates energy near to high population areas & load centres
• Circumvents grid barriers
• Mitigation for flooding and coastal estuary erosion
• Can provide baseload power, black start potential and system security inertia
Key Statistics
The UK holds 10% of the world’s tidal resource. With eight projects being considered along the west coast from Cumbria to Somerset, giving a potential for over 20 GW installed capacity, and these projects have the potential to generate 30 TWh/yr, equivalent to 12% of the UK’s energy demand.
Proven, Reliable, Long-Lasting
Tidal range schemes are designed to last for at least 120 years, offering predictable, indigenous renewable energy and the benefits of protection against coastal erosion and flooding, as well as providing defence against sea level rise. Tidal range energy complements tidal stream and other generation technologies and would be a valuable long-term asset, bringing diversity to a domestic energy-generation mix. Tidal range is a proven technology, with La Rance in France and Shiwa in South Korea being two examples of schemes providing timetabled energy generation.
Energy System Benefits
The ability to create large generation near centres of increasing power demand circumvents the grid constraint issues we are currently facing, offering additional long-term value to consumers. The GW scale of tidal range will embed energy security and resilience in the future decarbonised grid.
The Net Zero Transition
To date, the government has focused on increasing targets for wind and solar deployment. However, there is the issue of ‘resource adequacy’, or what happens in periods of winter low wind, especially during peak teatime demand? Currently, we rely on combined-cycle gas turbines to fill these gaps, but as the UK decarbonises the grid and looks to decouple from the volatile global fossil fuel market, indigenous resources such as tidal range should be a key focus for policymakers. There is also the issue of ‘resource deliverability’ alongside this, whether unproven technologies like Hydrogen and Carbon Capture are able to play their role quickly and effectively, and why we need to gamble on these technologies when Tidal Range is proven and deliverable.
Barriers to Tidal Range
The main barrier to the deployment of tidal range is the lack of a price stabilisation mechanism to provide investor confidence. Other barriers include:
• Large initial investment
• Consideration of complex environmental factors
• Changes to water hydrodynamics
• Compatibility with other marine users
Tidal Range Brochure
Tidal Range Fact Sheet
Key Requirements to Harness Tidal Range Potential?
To unlock the industry, we need to gain investor certainty through the creation of a strategic partnership between industry and government and the development of a price stabilisation mechanism that supports long-term energy generation projects such as tidal range.
Next steps:
• Create a government–industry partnership, similar to that for off-shore wind in 2012
• Create favourable policy for tidal range, which includes the Regulated Asset Base mechanism to gain investor confidence
• Develop a roadmap for tidal range
• Create an Industrial Tidal Range strategy, ensuring the supply chain is on-shored in the UK
• Build on work undertaken through the Tidal Lagoon Challenge
• Create a tidal range accelerator (utilising funding streams such as the Green Industrial Growth Accelerator)
• Develop a pilot demonstration scheme to accelerate progress in areas such as regulations and remove/reduce planning restrictions for test sites
• Select a pilot test site, which would be supported by a CfD price stabilisation mechanism
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