PC: Early development of Tidal Power

Tidal power in the form of Tidal Mills have been in use in Europe since the 6th century. Water is 800 times denser than air and the tides are more predictable than the winds. The large scale Tidal plant to generate electricity was opened in 1966 on the French coast. It's currently paid off and offers cheaper than nuclear electricity. The American federal government did a study to build a plant in northern Maine across the Bay of Fundy in 1924. What if the Americans and Canadians jointly developed the region for tidal electric in the late 1920s to the early 1930s. The higher cost of electricity could help cover the high capital cost. How plausible would it be for this to lead to tidal power making up 10% to 15% electricity production worldwide by 2015?
 
It was a little late last night so here is a bump. I was expecting that at least the Nuclear fanboys would call ASB by now.:D:p
Actually it is pretty close to ASB

There is only .3 Terawatts of Tidal Energy available worldwide. Period, end of story. World power consumption is 16 Terawatts. Theoretically, with maximum use of all available tidal energy, you get less than 2%

To get 10% Tidal Energy in 2015 you need to cut world power consumption by at least 80%
 
You could probably get a lot more if you went for tidal lagoons rather than barrages, but it gives you all sorts of other problems.
  1. Tidal power is very predictable - good from a planning point of view, but it also means that you can guarantee that there are weeks when it won't be there when you need it. Even in a perfect world with the site designed to maximise load factor, you're only going to get up to ~30%.
  2. Humans tend to live near coasts, thankfully, but electricity really doesn't travel well over long distances - in fact until very recently it pretty much doesn't travel at all. That means for the majority of your scenario the majority of earth's population is out of range of the power generated. That doesn't take much - 100 miles or so.
  3. You're looking at a truly vast civil engineering project. Bays are attractive both because they deal with three sides of your lagoon but also because they concentrate the tides giving a far greater tidal range than there would have been in the open ocean. That's why they Bay of Fundy and Bristol Channel are so often suggested - they have some of the very highest tidal ranges in the world. If you're going for lagoons as I think you have to for this scale of consumption, that's 10 times or more the amount of concrete per MWh generated.
  4. Maintenence is a nightmare - barrages you can just drive out to, lagoons you need boat access. Either will need to be very heavily engineered or take huge damage from the sea whenever there is a big storm.
 
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