Abstract
The number of distributed resources for renewable energy installed worldwide has been increasing rapidly in the last decade, and the great majority of these installations consist of solar panels and wind turbines. Other renewable sources of energy are not exploited to the same level: for instance, tidal energy is still a minute portion of the global energy capacity, in spite of the large amount of potential energy stored in tidal waves, and of the successful experience of the few existing plants. The world’s second largest tidal range occurs in the UK but at the moment tidal installations in this country are limited to a few prototypes. More recently, there has been a renewed interest in harnessing tidal energy in the UK, and a few tidal lagoon projects have been evaluated by the UK government. This paper provides an overview of the historical and current developments of tidal plants, a description of operation of tidal lagoons, challenges and opportunities for their integration within the UK energy systems and solutions to improve the dispatchability of tidal energy. The concepts described in the paper are applied to a tidal project proposed for South Wales.
Highlights
In the last decades, most of the western countries have been changing the nature of the energy generation mix, moving from traditional to renewable energy sources
Since tidal lagoons are going to be connected to the transmission system, and their output power can be predicted, it can be argued that they may be used for providing spinning reserve
This paper provided a review of the tidal lagoon technology and discussed the integration of
Summary
Most of the western countries have been changing the nature of the energy generation mix, moving from traditional to renewable energy sources. Similar estimates can be found in [6,7,8] In spite of this potential, ocean energy contributes only to a small percentage of worldwide power generation: at the end of 2015, the total tidal power installed was only 530 MW (not including pilot and demonstration projects) [9]. Rated power range), consisting mostly of “tidal lagoons”, are at the moment under consideration and aGW fewThis pioneering projects have been successfully deployed paper will focus on the description of tidal lagoons, because of their impact on the localor GW by the UK government [21]. A tidal section starts with a comparison between the characteristics of solar, wind and tidal energy, proposed for South Wales is used as an example to quantify the impact of this form of energy on shows the current levels of energy generation in the UK, divided by energy source.
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