Yesterday, passing through the town of Annapolis, I saw a sign for a Tidal Power station, so we stopped in to take a look.
It is one of only 5 tidal power stations in the world, according to the interpreter at the center. It consists of a one-way turbine, and only generates power as the tide goes out. When the tide comes in, they open other gates that let the water fill a basin above the turbine. Then when the tide starts out it starts generating electricity again.
At best it can put out 20 megawatts, but it varies by time of day and time of month. Like solar and wind, it does not generating 100% of the time, but unlike those it is very predictable when it will be generating and how much it will put out at any given second.
Here’s a scale model of the turbine. In the actual turbine, the diameter of the turbine blades is about 22 feet.
They didn’t let us tour the actual turbine, so this model, views of the water coming out below and our imagination had to fill in the picture.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Dale // Sep 21, 2015 at 2:15 pm
Do you think they have tightened up security on many of their dams like the US has after 911?
2 Daryl // Sep 21, 2015 at 3:07 pm
There wasn’t any security that I could see here. Though if they blew this up it wouldn’t create a tsunami that would kill people, just require them to burn a little more fossil fuels.
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