Orkney Council to spend £150k to dispose of £1 wave device
A wave energy converter bought by Orkney Islands[Scotland] council for £1 is expected to cost £150k to decommission.
The council purchased the Pelamis wave device in 2017 for a nominal sum in the hope of saving it from destruction, given its heritage value to the island.
But it has failed to find a use for the 180m (591ft) long wave machine and is now looking to dispose of it.
The council received £45,000 at the time for any disposal costs, but has spent almost all of it on maintenance.
The power to waste money knows no bounds.
pffft.
call up Relic from the old CBC Beachcombers, the scrap value 1300 tonnes
And…
What did they get out of it?
Another way of getting rid of taxpayers money with nothing in return and no accountability to the Mr….Mehoff…first name Jack who bought it.
Wow, no shortage of stupid out there. Sink it, that won’t cost much.
Our mainstream media will never tell us how many tens of $millions of taxpayer money have been wasted on trying to “harness” tidal power from the Bay of Fundy over the last 40 or so years.
There was a very quiet announcement in 2021. It’s found here.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/nova-scotia-power-annapolis-generating-station-1.5924509
Nova Scotia Power spent $13 million during a five year period to keep it operating. Now it’s got a further $25 million to decommission it. Its operation was halted because of the need for generator repairs and because of a Department of Fisheries and Oceans order that it constituted a threat to fish.
It was a complete failure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapolis_Royal_Generating_Station
It produced a miserable 20 MW for a peak annual production of 50 GWh. Its production had been in decline since it was first constructed in the early 1980s.
It wasn’t a complete failure, it served it’s purpose of transferring taxpayer money to politically connected firms or people that wouldn’t otherwise be profitable…
Nailing down comparative costs of generating a megawatt hour of electricity is complex, but Wragg estimated that once a few hundred tidal machines were out at sea, the blue energy might be cheaper than nuclear power.
No, economics are easy. Counting the cost is easy. The “global warmists” simply don’t want to. Because it’s economics are a horror show.
Yep. The power of nature knows no boundaries. My wife and I once invested in a local company that developed innovative ocean based salmon farming technologies. It might have solved a lot of issues, esp. related to eco-opposition. The huge ‘bags’ that replaced open-net pens were made of Zodiac like materials and the company patented a sophisticated pumping system. The bags meant (a) predators didn’t see the fish and vice versa (2) the pump could pick up water from anywhere in the water column, down to 60ft. (3) the vortex in an enclosed system created a constant current for fish health (4) perhaps most importantly, any feed that was not ingested fell to the bottom and was collected for fertilizer, along with the nutrient rich fish feces – thus protecting sea bottom health.
First of all it didn’t stop the enviromentalists, because their objective wasn’t stopping open net farming, it was to stop any ocean enterprise period. Secondarily, but what couldn’t be overcome, was that natures a bitch. We had test farms in Chile and Japan (because Canadian bureaucracy was a huge cost of business) and neither of them withstood the conditions over time.
Sure, we lost about $25G we could ill afford, but some lessons are hard and costly.