ocean

Buoys Make Power

- Adam Clare

In 2008 along the UK shoreline small underwater buoys will be generating electricity using that age old technology: wave power. The advantages to putting the buoys 50 meters under the water surface lies in that storms will not damage them, surface wave-powered generators can be damaged by rough seas.

“A town with 55,000 inhabitants would need half a square kilometre of seabed covered with 100 buoys to power it,” says Grey.

He adds that they could be effective in the North Atlantic, from Scotland down to Portugal, along the Pacific US shoreline, from San Francisco in the US up to Vancouver in Canada, along the coast of Chile, and even in South Africa and New Zealand.

But calmer seas, such as the Mediterranean do not have enough wave height to pump the buoy.

Better Tsunami Detection

- Adam Clare

Detecting tsunamis early can save millions of lives, and the earlier the detection the better. Researchers are wanting to put a new kind of detector that is placed on the ocean floor that will help provide better coverage in the Indian and Pacific oceans.

“They would offer greater coverage of the oceans by filling in large gaps between buoys, allowing scientists to promptly alert officials of undersea earthquakes that could trigger tsunamis and endanger coastal areas, she said.”

Sausage-Shaped Power Generator

- Adam Clare

waves Ocean Power Delivery is putting a sausage-shaped device that will generate electricity by floating on waves off the coast of Portugal.

“OPD will deliver three wave power generation units with capacity of 2.25 megawatts to Portuguese renewable energy group Enersis for $10 million, but the project could be expanded significantly, Norsk Hydro said.”

OPD is banking on making more of these generators because by 2010 the European Union requires 22 percent of electricity consumption to come from renewable energy sources.

I wonder if the technology behind this wave turbine is similar to what is being done in San Francisco.

Thanks to mkb for finding this good news!

Golden (Gate) Power

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

In the USA municipalities are doing exactly what the Bush administration despises – trying to use sustainable energy. San Francisco is one such city that is trying to be kind to the environment and they have a really cool idea of using tidal power under the Golden Gate Bridge.

They are investing $150,000 in a feasibility study to use tidal waves to power upwards of 40,000 homes! Officials note the obvious connection between current energy use and climate change and proclaim this project to be a needed step in the development of their city.

“Ultimately, city officials hope that turbines below the bridge will capture tidal energy from the powerful flow that circulates in and out of the mouth of the bay and generate as much as 38 megawatts of power, or enough to power 38,000 homes.

The tides at the Golden Gate offer one of the best locations on the western coast of North America to generate that power, according to a study released this summer by the Electric Power Research Institute and backed by the city’s public utilities agency.”

“Invisible” Wind Turbines

- Adam Clare

Good form of power- windResearchers at MIT have found a way to get wind turbines out of shallow water. Currently wind turbines in the ocean can only handle a depth of about 15 meters or less. Which means that people living on the shore have their view obstructed by them. This new wind turbine structure from MIT will allow turbines to be located far away from shore.

Paul D. Sclavounos, a professor of mechanical engineering and naval architecture, has spent decades designing and analyzing large floating structures for deep-sea oil and gas exploration. Observing the wind-farm controversies, he thought, “Wait a minute. Why can’t we simply take those windmills and put them on floaters and move them farther offshore, where there’s plenty of space and lots of wind?”

In 2004, he and his MIT colleagues teamed up with wind-turbine experts from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to integrate a wind turbine with a floater. Their design calls for a tension leg platform (TLP), a system in which long steel cables, or “tethers,” connect the corners of the platform to a concrete-block or other mooring system on the ocean floor. The platform and turbine are thus supported not by an expensive tower but by buoyancy. “And you don’t pay anything to be buoyant,” said Sclavounos.

According to their analyses, the floater-mounted turbines could work in water depths ranging from 30 to 200 meters. In the Northeast, for example, they could be 50 to 150 kilometers from shore. And the turbine atop each platform could be big–an economic advantage in the wind-farm business. The MIT-NREL design assumes a 5.0 megawatt (MW) experimental turbine now being developed by industry. (Onshore units are 1.5 MW, conventional offshore units, 3.6 MW.)

The tethers allow the floating platforms to move from side to side but not up and down–a remarkably stable arrangement. According to computer simulations, in hurricane conditions the floating platforms–each about 30 meters in diameter–would shift by one to two meters, and the bottom of the turbine blades would remain well above the peak of even the highest wave. The researchers are hoping to reduce the sideways motion still further by installing specially designed dampers similar to those used to steady the sway of skyscrapers during high winds and earthquakes.

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