I have a friend who was very interested in investing in this space, and did some research.
TLDR, even though the tech is probably mature enough, the economics just aren’t there for private industry yet. It’s require major state-level funding to get it off the ground at this point, IMO. Very similar to how solar used to be.
First, tidal turbines are very specialized pieces of hardware (compared to wind turbines), that have to survive corrosive brine for a decade to pay for themselves. There are not many competing manufacturers, and they are expensive. The wires connecting them to land are also expensive, both in installation but especially in maintenance. So the up front and ongoing capital expenditures are relatively high, and there isn’t an economy of scale like there is for wind turbines and solar panels.
Second, there aren’t as many places that are well situated for tidal as you think. You need a basin of relatively shallow ocean, close to metropolitan power grids. There are only a handful of places like this in the world (around the UK, India, Australia), and developers would require a lot of work to get approval to develop this space, compared to solar or wind, where permit-seeking has relatively well-trodden path.
That would be fine, and we’d still be in business, but third, when you compare it to the opportunity cost of investing in a more traditional (or even “renewable”) power plant of a similar output, the story really falls apart. The ROI for the builder just isn’t there, and it makes way more sense to build solar or wind farms.
Some forward thinking governments are trying to help the ROI angle by providing subsidies on the generated electricity, but as a developer this is sketchy, because you still aren’t breaking even until 5-10 years, even with subsidies, and subsidies themselves can be politically fickle. When you combine this with the uncertainty attached to the turbines being relatively bespoke technology (compared to the commodity of wind turbines and solar panels), it makes sense why we haven’t seen more development here.
This is a fantastic summary! In the United States, I believe that the Pacific Northwest and parts of the Maine coastline were also considered, but for many of the reasons above, I don't think any of those projects really achieved critical mass for wider adoption.
I'm not bullish on the future of tidal power--there may be some use case for it, but the reality of the engineering challenges associated with putting hardware in a marine tidal zone for years at a time presents serious obstacles with limited advantages over versus a wind turbine or solar array of the same capacity.
I'm curious, do you know if your friend ended up investing?
He was looking specifically to invest in Gujarat, because of family ties. However, the government decided the project wasn’t worth it and binned it. IIRC they were more interested in developing solar. I tried googling around for articles related to it, this the best I could find: https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/renewable/i...
Australian government wasn’t super interested in developing tidal resources because of the coal special interest groups, but also because solar resources are lower hanging fruit. The UK project was very legitimate and institutionally mature, but was more of a science project for proving the technology than an investment opportunity.
Thanks for sharing - great info. I still think that the potential energy (no pun intended) is huge, so if the engineering challenges are solved, it may not compete with solar, but should be competitive with wind.
TLDR, even though the tech is probably mature enough, the economics just aren’t there for private industry yet. It’s require major state-level funding to get it off the ground at this point, IMO. Very similar to how solar used to be.
First, tidal turbines are very specialized pieces of hardware (compared to wind turbines), that have to survive corrosive brine for a decade to pay for themselves. There are not many competing manufacturers, and they are expensive. The wires connecting them to land are also expensive, both in installation but especially in maintenance. So the up front and ongoing capital expenditures are relatively high, and there isn’t an economy of scale like there is for wind turbines and solar panels.
Second, there aren’t as many places that are well situated for tidal as you think. You need a basin of relatively shallow ocean, close to metropolitan power grids. There are only a handful of places like this in the world (around the UK, India, Australia), and developers would require a lot of work to get approval to develop this space, compared to solar or wind, where permit-seeking has relatively well-trodden path.
That would be fine, and we’d still be in business, but third, when you compare it to the opportunity cost of investing in a more traditional (or even “renewable”) power plant of a similar output, the story really falls apart. The ROI for the builder just isn’t there, and it makes way more sense to build solar or wind farms.
Some forward thinking governments are trying to help the ROI angle by providing subsidies on the generated electricity, but as a developer this is sketchy, because you still aren’t breaking even until 5-10 years, even with subsidies, and subsidies themselves can be politically fickle. When you combine this with the uncertainty attached to the turbines being relatively bespoke technology (compared to the commodity of wind turbines and solar panels), it makes sense why we haven’t seen more development here.