The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity by James Lovelock

Author:James Lovelock [Lovelock, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141900810
Google: LHG1TxRXzAAC
Goodreads: 60100990
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2006-01-15T06:00:00+00:00

Wave and tidal energy

Tidal energy makes use of the stored gravitational energy of the Earth, Moon and Sun system. Science fiction tells of future civilizations who draw almost all their energy needs from this clean renewable source; the consequence is the eventual decay of the Moon’s orbit until, close to the Earth and filling the sky, the moon is torn apart by the uneven pull of gravity. This need not deter us from starting now to build modest tidal power schemes. I am indebted to Jonathon Porritt, the authoritative leader of environmental opinion, for details of a tidal-energy scheme for the Severn Estuary; they were strongly supported in a statement by Professor Ian Fells at a meeting at Dartington Hall in Devon in June 2004, who said that a Severn Barrage was estimated to cost £13 billion, but since it could provide 6 per cent of the UK’s energy needs, it was an attractive business proposition. At La Rance near Cherbourg in France a similar but smaller tidal energy scheme has operated for many years now and provides energy to supplement the mainly nuclear French electricity supply.

There are several experimental schemes now running around the coasts of the UK that aim to draw energy from the movements of the sea. Some use the motion of the waves, others the tides and still others the currents that flow in the sea as a consequence of the tides. An excellent review of tidal energy is in Chemistry and Engineering News for October 2004. While such schemes seem well worth while as experiments and to gain hands-on experience, we should not expect even the most promising of them to deliver a substantial part of our energy needs before at least twenty, and more probably forty, years have passed.

It is rarely appreciated that almost every engineering development, whether steam power, electricity supply, radio, television, telephones or passenger aircraft, took about forty years to pass from open enthusiasm to widespread application in the first world. I see no signs that this gestation period can be lessened, except perhaps when the imperatives of war cause a whole nation to act in unison.

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