Tides and Tidal Power: A Historical Perspective

A public lecture by Professor Alistair Borthwick, FICE, FREng, FRSE

Over the centuries, the tides and, more recently, their power potential have attracted much scientific interest. For example, in 1665, Sir Robert Moray authored a publication in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society on “A Relation of Some extraordinary Tydes in the West-Isles of Scotland”. This lecture will take a historical journey through the scientific developments in our understanding of tides and their power potential, commencing at Ahmedabad in Ancient India, passing through the Dark and Middle Ages, the pre- and post-Newtonian periods, and finally taking us to modern approaches to assessing tidal stream power for the Pentland Firth, Scotland, and Raithlin Island, Ireland. The final part of the lecture will consider the use of contra-rotating vertical axis turbines for extracting green energy from rivers and tides.

Alistair Borthwick is an Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund Hall Oxford, Emeritus Professor at The University of Edinburgh, Visiting Distinguished Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and a UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow.

He was previously a Professor of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford where he worked from 1990 to 2011. He was Head of Civil & Environmental Engineering at University College Cork from 2011-13. His research interests include river, coastal, and ocean engineering, and marine renewable energy. He was awarded a DSc from the University of Oxford in 2005, an honorary doctorate by Budapest University in 2016, the Gold Medal from the Institution of Civil Engineers in 2019, the YanYuan Friendship Award by Peking University in 2020, and the Zhongguancun Award for International Cooperation in 2024. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.