Why Liverpool's £3.5bn Tidal Energy Project Matters. 

Actually the U.K. grid has 1.6GW of battery storage ( as at the end of 2023). However this generally to replace peaker plants. We also have some 4 GW of pumped storage. It is pumped storage that the government should have encouraged over the years as it is this which provides longer duration storage and there are a number of potential sites around the U.K. ( mainly Scotland and Wales) which could at least double this amount.

Not to mention the Hinkley Point C project construction duration of 32 years and a projected cost to the consumer of £92/MWh at 2018 prices for 35 years from commissioning. Compare this with around £50/MWh and falling for wind power generation. Renewables will have pretty much displaced Hinkley before it's even commissioned. Did you know that combined, all the nuclear power plants in the UK produce about 18% of the country's power needs? This means for all the time & investment for Hinkley alone, it'll produce around just 3%.

What makes you think Tidal cannot do the same... Hydro has been and it's not a little boost at the end of life like Nuclear in Hydro it's securing the future with little maintenance for close to 100 year in many cases.

@@Alex-cw3rz Hydro and tidal are great, but geographically limited. We're running out of cites to build them! The UK will get, at most, a few gigawatts of power from each (we use 30GW on average at the moment, and that'll have to go up to 100GW as we electrify everything). So we need something else as well.

@@domtweed7323 firstly the fact they need to go to certain locations is not a revaltion and secondly talk about geographically limited and you support nuclear nuclear is steam power and therefore requires a large river, sea or lake to function. Where in the world did I say we should only do tidal and hydro? Let alone what you said is not true, firslty because the figures aren't correct and secondly we are right now in the midst of deals with Norway to use pumped storage there and power it through energy produced in the UK. Therefore we can have solar, wind, tidal, wave, hydro and nuclear as ridiculously expensive as that last option is and that will power the pumped storage in Norway.

@@Alex-cw3rz On nuclear: You can also cool it with sea water, so the entire coastline is suitable for nuclear sites (in theory, cause you'd only need a few dozen nuclear reactors to power the UK). On hydro: My point was that it's great, but our hydro resources I the UK are very small and mostly used up. And the tidal sites would also be used up quickly if we started using them (which we should!) Pumped hydro is great, but it's not a power source, it's just a big gravity battery. You need something to charge it up. Actually the first pumped hydro sites were built to support nuclear power stations, cause nuclear can't load balance well.

It sounds like you've never heard of batteries, which reduce in cost by approximately 90% every 15 years, or so.

@carlfrancis8565 Carl come on. If the power is too expensive as I say it does no matter if battery's were free the power would still be too expensive. As I say no one has been able to work this out even at the best sites, never mind what we would need for wide adoption. The 2nd problem is the cost of the battery's. Over the last 15 years chemistry have not moved on much, but manufacturing has scaled dramatically. Manufacturing costs have consequently dropped such that the cost is basically transparent. When you commercially buy a battery cell now it is almost completely material and transport costs, so scaling manufacture more is going to make very little difference. That means that we need to see massive changes to chemistry to drive the reduction. If you have been paying attention to the space you will know that there have been any number revolutionary chemistry's proposed and perhaps until later this year when a factory in China goes live no game changing successes have come about for quite some time (Tesla battery's were better because of a better battery management solution not chemistry). BTW I do hope that you are right on battery cost reduction as that would be good for the world. I found a report from the US Department of Energy on the predictions reduction of costs of grid storage, they reckon a 30% to 75% reduction in cost per kwh can be expected over 30 years from 2020 to 2050. So sadly battery's are not likely to reduce 90% every 15 years or so.