Renewable Energy...

 I am always very interested in renewable energy. The way we are going at the moment is not sustainable for our future.

Fossil fuels will be a dirty word to future generations and although they have helped us build wealth, greatness and of course power this has to change and the extremes in our climate, which is happening now in most countries of the world, will only make this happen sooner rather than later.

Every day now in the news there is some ongoing disaster where records are broken with heat, floods or forest fires and even the greatest sceptics must acknowledge this cannot continue as the planet continues to heat.

 

So while we learn to harness the suns energy and the technology for battery storage continues to improve, also energy from the wind, an interesting development has just taken place in the Orkney isles of Scotland. The worlds largest tidal turbine weighing 680 metric tons and dubbed the worlds most powerful has started to generate power.

 

The turbine which is 74 metres long and anchored to the sea bed off Orkney has the capacity to fill the needs and the electrical demand for 2,000 homes. It actually floats on the surface of the water and has rotors attached to its legs which extract energy from the tidal flow. Electricity is passed from the turbine via cable on the seabed to onshore networks.

 

The company Orbital Marine Power hopes to eventually roll this technology out around the world and also has the potential for this technology to be used in river systems and trials will now go ahead in parts of the River Thames.

 

This is not new and has been tried before but the technology has improved from the early days of experimentation and, although expensive now, once production steps up and costs reduce we shall be seeing more of this kind of energy production.

 

There is always hope for the future and even though it does seem dark at times we have to have hope for the generations to come...