Power from Arctic waters

Tidal energy has been used for centuries with both tidal current and rise and fall of tides put to work. They provided power for flour mills, saw mills, breweries, etc. Tide mills that dotted several geographic areas regions of Europe from The Netherlands to Spain and from Wales to England, but also coastal areas of the United States and Canada. They may well be considered the forerunners of the power-generating tidal power stations. These are not numerous, except for the mini plants in China.

Though power stations have been constructed in France and Canada, and on Kislaya Guba, interest in building more plants waned, as did most other schemes to tap the energies of the ocean to generate electricity. Yet, utilizing the tidal processes has received considerable attention during the last few years as oil reserves, and especially prices, and climate changes cause increasing concern.

Government funding, particularly in Europe, is currently more common as several new approaches as getting refined.

The only plant in the Arctic has been the Russian facility near Murmansk, at least until Hammerfest put a tidal scheme to work. The Kislaya central celebrates its 40th anniversary and has proven that a tidal plant can function--and last--in the Arctic, that it can replace fossil fuel facilities, that costs of construction and maintenance (as compared to its model on the Rance River) can be cut, and even....can be built by an exclusively female team!

Though at the international congress of Tokyo in 2006, Russian colleagues distraught by the passing of Kislaya's "father" Bernshtein, were lamenting the surpluses of petroleum that smothered all interest in tidal power in Russia, a different wind seems to blow in the Russian Arctic and plans for tidal power stations are a serious topics since a few years.

Hammerfest, in Norway, is the most northerly city. This "Arctic" city has been one of the leading sites on the foreground of tidal power utilization experiments in the 21st century. Indeed, while the British Marine Current Turbines company has conducted several tests in Great Britain, tests which hold great promise for the development of tidal power tapping, the Norwegian company, Hammerfest Strom, went one better and connected their 300kv tidal generator machine to the town of Hammerfest's grid thus becoming one of the first grid connected tidal turbine schemes in the world. The Norwegian company believed that it would have its first tidal farm of over 20 second generation devices operational before the end of 2008. This would have been the 3rd phase of its "Blue Concept" project and would result in a tidal farm that would produce 10MW of renewable electricity.