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there is no guarantee of the timing or of the availability of the supply, and even the most optimistic proponents of doing more to harness the wind agree that after 40 years of successful
exploitation they might contribute 2% of our electricity supply.
THE TIDES
There is excitement about the potential of harnessing the tides, and
the Government has supported exploration of the possibilities of a
tidal barrage scheme on the Severn Estuary. We are also continuing to look at wave power more generally.
If the Severn Barrage Scheme was completed it would harness the
second greatest opportunity for tidal power in the whole of the
world. There are no similar opportunities available in Western
Europe and if the Severn scheme was eventually completed and it
could not be completed before the end of the century - the maximum
it could produce would be 5% of Britain's current electricity
demand, or an amount equivalent to one fifth of the increase in
electricity demand that had taken place before its construction was
completed.
Tidal power also has its problems. You only have daily peak loads,
you do not have the consistency of supply; tidal electricity will
not coincide with the peak loads of demands.
We should take advantage of a tidal system if it is found to be at
all viable. But even if it was viable in the Severn, and we looked
at all the other potentially viable places such as the Mersey in the
United Kingdom, the total contribution of using every tidal estuary
that could be tolerably used would be, at the maximum, an 8%
contribution to our current electricity demand, equivalent to
meeting the increased demand of electricity for a 4-year period.
GEOTHERMAL ENERGY
We have hopes that we can obtain useful energy from the hot dry rocks below the earth's surface and have recently substantially
increased our research programme. Our experiments into geothermal energy have gone well, but they are far away from producing anything that can be commercially applied. There is plenty of heat below the earth's surface, the difficult task is extracting that heat and providing the energy where it is required.
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