Turning the Tide on Hydro Power

This week, the UK government began the process of bringing gene-edited food into law. And that will allow for the sale of crops that have had improvements made to them by science. The new genetic technology bill, as it's called, will replace an existing EU moratorium on growing food that had been modified in this way and it will allow scientists to use tools like the gene editing system known as CRISPR to improve their crop yields, build in disease resistance, or even give plants added nutritional benefits. Now critics on the other hand are calling the bill GM crops, but with better PR. Although the government was intending to follow this course of action anyway, it was the looming food security crisis that led to the bill being expedited. James Tytko spoke with Gideon Henderson, who's the chief scientific advisor to DEFRA, that's the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs....

Gideon - I think there are a couple of important things that have changed. One of which is that the public have got much more used to people talking about genetic information. It's quite a long time now of course, since the 1990s, and in that time we've seen really substantial benefits to human health and use of genetic information in biomedical processes. There was also quite a genuine concern in the 1990s of how this was actually playing into the hands of big business rather than helping food producers or helping the public. And I think this time around things are very different in that gene editing is a very accessible tool, which smaller businesses can use, and it's much easier to get into that market.

James - This new bill obviously has a degree of urgency with the food security issues, but does it feel also like the right time to be pushing this legislation forward when trust in scientists is perhaps at a bit of a high?

Gideon - I don't think it hurts at all that scientists have been so useful to the public in the last couple of years, but that doesn't explain the timing. The timing is more explained by the combination of the development of the tools that enable this precision breeding and this accurate gene editing, and also the UK leaving the EU so that we're now able to reexamine the regulation ourselves independently.

James - What benefits can we expect to see once this passes?

Gideon - Many other countries have been enabling gene editing of crops for some time now, so perhaps the most immediate change that we might see as consumers in this country is that products that have beneficial qualities for us as humans, or for the way that they're grown, on our shelves as a consequence of what's happened elsewhere. But even more exciting from a UK perspective, and in the only slightly longer term, I think we're going to see new crops developed, which will provide significant benefits to the environment and significant benefits to human health through their consumption, and increase productivity of our land so that we might free up some land area.

James - The bill also will enable the development of precision-bred animals as well. Can you tell me a bit about that and when we might see that come into practice?

Gideon - Well, as a nice example, is there's a porcine respiratory disease, which is endemic in this country and in many other countries, which causes a great deal of suffering for animals and dramatically lowers productivity of pig farming. And it's been demonstrated by UK scientists that we can develop a breed of pig that is resistant to that respiratory disease and that will be an early win by which we can both increase productivity and decrease animal suffering.

James - Currently, no UK supermarket is willing to say it will stock gene-edited food. New Scientist contacted eleven of the UK's biggest supermarkets, none responded to confirm. So clearly they're being very cautious; there's still a hangover from the GM crops debate. You'd have thought bringing down the cost of food would only serve their interests, really?

Gideon - Retailers are, as you suggest, fairly positive and supportive of the ability to make better, healthier food with less environmental consequence. It does make sense that an individual retailer might be resistant to come out and support as a single entity. But I don't have the sense that any retailer is hostile to these changes either. They're just not willing to be the first one to put their head above the parapet.

James - There could be other benefits of this in the long-term. I'm thinking about opportunities for countries in the developing world, for example, where some of the main exports of food crops, they might be able to grow plants that have a longer shelf life or produce a bigger yield, which before had the stumbling block of not fitting our regulations.

Gideon - Certainly many areas will be under significant heat stress and sometimes water stress in the future as climate changes, and building crops that are more resilient will be much easier using gene editing approaches than relying only on more traditional breeding approaches. So we can help to really secure food supply across the world. And one example that I like here is rice blight, which is a disease that can significantly lower the output and the productivity of rice crops around the world. And of course we don't grow rice in the UK, but it's really important in Southeast Asia and in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly west Africa where rice blight can significantly damage productivity. There are proven gene editing approaches by which we might make rice resistant to rice blight and therefore be able to eradicate some of those problems or much improve them.

As we go into our teenage years, all kinds of changes happen to our bodies and our appearance. But there are also important changes happening to our psychology too, and sometimes that can lead to mood disorders like depression. What's striking though is that girls seem to be affected twice as often as boys. But why? Well Lena Dorfschmidt, at the University of Cambridge, wondered the same thing, so she scanned the brains of a large group of adolescent children to look at which areas change their patterns of connections the most at this age. In girls there was a lot more rewiring going on, particularly in brain circuitry known to be linked to depression. This, she suspects, might make girls more susceptible to developing a mood disorder in the first place…

Lena - We know that, during adolescence, our brains develop very rapidly. We also know that, during that time, a lot of psychiatric disorders are diagnosed. For example, depression. Women are much more likely, about twice as likely, to be diagnosed with depression than men. We asked ourselves the question, "is there something about development during adolescence that may trigger this increase of incidence of depression in women during that time?"

Chris - You don't just think that there's a disparity in pickup; that women are more likely to talk about it, men are more likely to do the stiff upper lip thing and keep quiet.

Lena - There may be a certain component of that. I don't think that explains everything, though. I don't think we have women reporting symptoms twice as much as men do. Also, we have a separate sample of data where we can actually see that, even in healthy adolescents, women are more likely to experience difficulties with mood.

Chris - And you are attributing that to these very rapid changes that have to happen to the brain as we grow up?

Lena - Yeah, exactly. You can imagine this: if you wanted to reorganise your room and move things around, there's a chance you might drop something on the way. The more you change, the more likely you're going to break something. A brain is in some way similar. If you remodel or rewire a lot of connections in your brain, there's a greater chance that things may go wrong along the way.

Chris - This is the moving parts get broken more often hypothesis, isn't it?

Lena - Yeah, exactly.

Chris - So how did you try and get underneath the skin of that then?

Lena - We used MRI scanners where we can take 3D images of the brain and monitor brain activity while people are just lying in the scanner. We know that even when people don't do anything while they're lying in the scanner, we can find out a lot about the way that their brain functions already.

Chris - So, you've got groups of adolescents that you can watch in this way and ask the question, "Well, how is your brain wired up?"

Lena - Exactly. We just look at how the different brain regions communicate with each other. If neurons in specific regions fire together, we say that they're very likely to be connected, or there's connectivity between these regions. There may be two regions that are highly connected, they fire together all the time. We think that they are working together.

Chris - And how do you map that onto underlying mood or psychiatric problems?

Lena - What we did first is we looked at what this firing together of brain regions looks like in males and females separately, and then constructed a map of differences between them. We can now understand which brain regions are most different between girls and boys and men and women. What we found is there's a set of brain regions where the females develop much more drastically than the males do. So, in those regions, the women restructure, rewire much more than boys do. Then, we looked at these regions and overlapped them with the regions that we already know from other studies are implicated in depression. There's a really good match between those. We know that the same regions are impacted.

Chris - Why would a female brain wire itself into a state of depression at all?

Lena - I don't think we can say the female brain wires itself into the state of depression. The people we looked at are healthy adolescents. The only thing we are trying to show is that male and female brains develop differently and women change a bit more. It is simply that because they change more, we could assume that something may go wrong.

Chris - So, you've now got this map, or this network of connections between different regions of the brain. And you can see dynamically how that changes in adolescence. It strongly overlaps with areas that are implicated in subsequent mood disorders. Does this give us any insights into what causes that to happen? When people do get mood disorders, what we could do perhaps to head it off before they end up with an entrenched depression?

Lena - Unfortunately, we don't understand very much about that yet. There isn't a great amount of detail on how depression looks different in men and women. And this is really what we're trying to do with our work here. We're trying to show that if we want to understand how to treat depression, we need to look into males and females separately because we can now already see that there is a signal that is very different between them.

Much of the stilted progress in the marine renewable space is predictably down to cash. Stephen Wyatt is the director of emerging technology at catapult. Catapult is a not-for profit network of innovation centres that help to link up businesses, bright ideas, and funding to get good high potential ideas as they put it into the marketplace. Chris Smith asked Stephen what the landscape for marine renewables looks like at the moment...

Stephen - The landscape for marine renewables is generally positive at the moment. There is a huge push towards net zero and offshore renewables generally have been identified as being a key part of the future energy mix.

Chris - Well you say it looks positive, but we've just heard from our previous guest that actually we are back in the 1990s in terms of the comparison between where other renewables are and marine renewables. So are you saying there's a lot of potential? It just is waiting to be realised?

Stephen - I think for things like tidal stream energy they are still in the development phase. We've spent the last 10 or 15 years moving from the lab scale prototypes through to full scale prototypes. And as we've just heard the first commercial arrays. We now really are in the place where we're looking to get genuinely commercial and moving to engage with the government's subsidy system that will allow us to move to that first phase of commercial projects.

Chris - Well, Simon Waldman was saying we basically learn by doing so have we got realistic technologies now that are actually enabling us to do that? And is there sufficient resource there to grease the wheels financially?

Stephen - We do have a handful of very credible technology concepts. Often these technologies are developed by small companies and the nature of the grant funding can be a little bit stop start. And of course they have to convince private sector investors with the right risk appetite to come in. So I'd say it's been a little bit of a turbulent journey, but we are now thankfully in the place where we have a number of credible concepts ready to scale up to these commercial arrays.

Chris - How much are the government putting up? Because obviously this is being led by governments. When you've got a big problem which needs somebody to de-risk it a bit, the way you de-risk it is governments give grants and that kind of thing. So how much potential funding is there?

Stephen - So historically tidal companies have received from government have received capital grants. And it's been a bit stop start as I say, but typically that's been between 10 and 20 million pounds per annum, but that's not a lot when you try...

Chris - Is that per project or is that for the entire field?

Stephen - No, that that's been in its entirety. It's not a lot when you sort of start looking across a number of concepts we're trying to progress here.

Chris - I mean, just putting that in perspective, just building one wind turbine costs 4 million. So, when you think you're now dealing with a very different environment where the exigences of being in the marine environment are huge, aren't they, 20 million is nothing.

Stephen - I think that's right. I think the tidal energy companies have worked incredibly hard to make a small amount of public funding go a long way. They've also had a bit of a hiatus in funding in recent years, but now thankfully due to a large part of lobbying by industry, we now have a subsidy regime in place that will allow them to tap into the same sort of project funding that we're seeing for things like offshore wind and nuclear. So if you like tidal stream, despite some of the headwinds of developing the technology has now come of age and they're able to bid into the same sort of subsidy pots as more established technologies,

Chris - We were hearing just now that, um, the prediction is that perhaps 10% of what we need in energy at the moment is potentially source-able from tidal stream and so on. Does that seem realistic to you? And do you think we are on target to get there and over what sort of time scale?

Stephen - Our sort of own analysis probably puts the figure a little bit higher than that? Definitely think it's realistic to assume that tidal stream will make a material contribution. It's there, it can be tapped into now, but ideally we want to continue to drive technology development, bring the cost of generation down a little bit more, and then we can start deploying commercial scale. My view is we're at the start of a golden decade here. And so over the next 10 years, we're gonna see tidal stream move at a rapid pace. Similar to the journey we've seen for things like offshore wind, where costs have more than halved over the last five years. And I think with the appropriate deployment levels, we'll see that happen again.

Relatively few companies have demonstrated commercial viability in open sea tidal stream trials. In order to receive government support, companies must be producing electricity and supplying that to the grid. This stage of development is sometimes referred to as the valley of death. When a startup has begun operations, but not generated revenue. This is sort of where all the startups in the marine renewable space are. One of the pioneers in this space is Orbital. Their CEO Andrew Scott tells Chris Smith about the O2, a device currently generating electricity off the shores of Scotland...

Andrew - Our technology's a little bit different, very innovative. It doesn't look like a wind turbine, a miniature wind turbine bolted to the bottom to the sea bed. Some people kind of think it looks like a spacecraft or an aircraft. So it's got two big wings and a fuselage and actually the whole thing floats. And at the end of the wings, we've got our power trains. So there's two power trains, one at either end and it's anchored on site with a big set of moorings and the wings are hinged, so they can come up to the surface so we can get access to everything at low cost and then they can drop down to start generating power.

Chris - Now, when you say power trains by that you mena the turbines for want of a better phrase, that's going to extract the energy from the water flowing past your structure?

Andrew - Yeah. As one of your previous guests was saying it's a very similar technology to actually generate the power as wind turbines. Some people call them the cells or power trains, but it's really the rotors that take the kinetic energy and turn it into rotational energy. And then you couple that with a gearbox and a generator.

Chris - And how big is the whole thing?

Andrew - Yeah, that's the other thing that will probably surprise people is it kind of looks like a plane and it actually is about the size of a jumbo jet 747.

Chris - And how much juice comes down that cable?

Andrew - The turbine that we've built and launched last year, we call it the O2, it's the world's most powerful tidal turbine. And when flow speeds get up to 2.5 mps, it reaches rated capacity, which is two megawats per hour.

Chris - Would you then envisage a fleet of these that you would anchor in optimal locations, presumably so they don't all interfere with each other or bash into each other, but you would therefore be optimising the extraction of energy from where the tidal flow is fastest?

Andrew - Yeah, absolutely. In the same way that you get wind farms that are multiples of 1, 2, 3, 4 megawatt turbines we envisage that we would have multiple of these inner tidal stream sites that are all generating power onto a cable back to shore.

Chris - And I suppose one of the massive advantages of doing this is that because the tide comes in and out twice a day, you know, when, and so it makes the generation and therefore the provision of energy that you know, is gonna be there very predictable and therefore very reliable.

Andrew - Yeah. That's the beauty of tidal stream energy, you know exactly how much energy you're gonna produce and you know exactly when you're gonna produce it. And there's actually value in knowing when you're not gonna produce it as well. If you've got planned maintenance and things, you can schedule it for times when there's very little or no tide. So you can do work without really disrupting the overall performance or yield of the turbine.

Chris - One of our other guests was pointing out that, you know, it's a pretty harsh environment the marine environment. I suppose that by having something that is not stuck to the seabed, you can lift those wings up to get to the business end of the operation quite simply, you've actually made it much easier to maintain. And therefore you presumably have saved quite a bit of money?

Andrew - Yeah, absolutely. There's kind of a golden rule or a rule of thumb in the offshore environment. A job that will cost You maybe a pound offshore will cost you 10 pounds offshore at the surface, but it'll probably cost you a thousand pounds at the bottom of the sea bed. So, being able to get access to equipment quickly and cheaply on the surface is absolutely key.

Chris - When is this gonna be realised? So it is actually beyond the prototype generating little bits of power stage?

Andrew - Well, O2 two is generating power right now into the UK grid. So, we built it and launched it last year from Dundee. The aspirations are, and we're planning on building more of these in the coming years to start creating these arrays, both in Scotland and around the UK.

Chris - For comparison then Andrew. So if I build a big wind turbine megawatt for megawatt, what's it cost to have the same generating capacity with one of your devices?

Andrew - The average cost for a megawatt offshore is probably today around about 3 to 3.5 million pounds per megawatt. And for us, we built the last turbine at just a little bit over 5 million pounds of megawatt.

Chris - So you're not far off what we're already achieving with wind?

Andrew - No, not very far at all. Now the overall cost of energy is a function of a lot of other things. Obviously your resource is free, but how you generator performs, you know, one of your previous guests was talking about improving the performance of rotors and all these sorts of things. So these are things that wind have benefited from for the last 20, 30 years. And indeed they've benefited from a volume of scale, economies of scale. So those are all things that have allowed their overall cost of energy to come down a lot and certainly landing where we are from a manufacturing cost where we are, we think is, you know, really exciting.

Chris - Have you now got an order book then to do this, not just for the UK, but internationally, or is this still very much at the stage of hand to mouth? It's making some electricity, you're proving the point, but you're still waiting for those calls to come in?

Andrew - Well, we do have commercial projects here in the UK and we anticipate this summer, we should get clearance from government support hopefully to move forward with them. And indeed, actually we've got another turbine to build and put up in Orkney and combine with an electrolyser and battery storage as well. So yeah, we're moving forward, with some exciting commercial projects here in the UK and we're seeing definitely an up turn of interest from regions around the world that have got tidal stream energy that are very interested in what we're doing.