Turning the tides: Could hidden sea power energise our coastal towns?
I love that someone is finally thinking small and local in an energy world obsessed with massive offshore wind farms and continental-scale solar arrays. Mummery's generator seems to be built on the common sense observation that coastal towns don't need a miracle, they just need a steady, predictable current they can trust. The tide is one of the few forces on Earth you can set your watch to, and that reliability has always been the hidden appeal of tidal power.
The catch, as always with ocean engineering, is the salt, the storms, and the sheer brutality of the marine environment. I'd want to know how this thing holds up after a decade of being battered by the North Sea or the Atlantic. But the ambition is right. If we can make tidal energy work at the village scale, we might not need to wait for some distant green utopia. We could just walk down to the shore and let the sea pay us back for all those years of taking.
So here is to the stubborn engineers who keep staring at the waves, convinced there's a better way. I hope the tide is turning for them.