Lake Onslow Pumped Hydro a goer.

[nzoomed]

Thats interseting to see, I didnt know the UK had such a system running, I know they are in europe with the likes of Germany I think.
There should be more incentives for homeowners to install solar PV systems on their homes much like they do in Australia.
I think a big issue from what ive been told is that the grid would not be able to cope with the extra load if there was a surplus amount of solar power going into the grid.
Perhaps this is true, I know a friend tells me that he is unable to put any more than 5kW or something into his street and he has a ton of panels, but no battery yet, and they want him to pay for upgrading the street if he plans to sell all his surplus generation capacity.

Regarding tidal power I would have thought maintenance and installation would be the biggest issue, I feel the issues surrounding marine life is a little overblown, are they concerned about them sucking in dolphins, etc, or just fish?
Could they not simply add some sort of screen or mesh on the intake to stop large objects getting sucked in?

I'm dealing with a 5kW/phase export limit by Powerco presently as we are upgrading our PV from 5kW to ~8.5kW to enable us to fully supply our 7kW EV charger from our own solar generation. Powerco's reason is that more than 5kW per phase runs the risk of unbalancing their phases.

We have multiple phases into our property, just not out to the building where our PV is sited and running the extra phase there isn't practical due to physical constraints. The fact that we have the bulk of our house's circuits on the same phase as the PV (i.e. to maximise our self-consumption) and totalling a fused loading beyond the 63A property maximum (but offset by EV charger and HWC being PV fed) didn't sway them (5kW is only 22A after all). It's looking like we will have to throttle our export if the 5kW limit is breeched which hopefully we can minimise by self consumption at crucial times.

The NZ electricity supply system is far from inviting to those of us with domestic generation but we can only hope that this perspective will change as TPTB realise the value of distributed generation and micro-grids can present in terms of power supply resilience.

Regarding tidal power installations the damage to marine life is real and minced fish and marine mammals isn't a great look for what is promoted as sustainable power generation. It's also not as easy as putting screens in place as these will accumulate weed and other debris over time which then presents a reduction in generation as well as a hazardous cleaning job for maintenance workers.

OK, that makes alot of sense with phase balancing, this is probably the issue my friend has.
If more people had solar on the street, it would actually be a better thing in this regard, as they could place neighbours on alternating phases to balance them out and would largely eliminate the problem.
He is the only person on his street with solar, so this wont help things.
If you were to load balance yourself across 3 phases, it would require some expensive equipment.

I once met a person contracted by trustpower who was in charge of capturing eels on the water intake to a power station, he said they were being more proactive around it, but said the eels would typically pass through the turbines fine, depending on their size with some that may get injured, but they have put a screen up and they capture them all and then release down stream of the power station.
I think there is potential to design a tidal system that would minimise risk, I dont think the turbines would spin ultra fast in the ocean currents, especially under grid load, ive seen concepts that look more like a wind farm that sits underwater rather than the turbine in a tube which would present much more issues with the likes of seaweed, etc.
Either way, I think its worth watching what happens with it in Europe.