Ocean Power Plant

Posted on August 30, 2006  Comments (3)

Interest in ocean power resurges by Dennis Camire via A new wave of interest in ocean power:

Ocean thermal power plants, which generate electricity from the temperature difference between the tropics’ warm surface water and deep cold water, could be built on land in several hundred areas around the globe’s equatorial zones and also could be constructed as floating plants.

A recent Electric Power Research Institute study found sites in Maine, Alaska, California and Washington that had good potential for tidal power generation with production costs ranging from 4.2 cents per kilowatt hour to 10.8 cents. By comparison, the average retail cost of electricity to U.S. consumers in May was 8.64 cents per kilowatt hour.

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Wave energy also is drawing attention with Ocean Power Technologies planning to build a 50-megawatt wave park off the southern Oregon coast. The system uses buoys that drive a piston with the rise and fall of the waves to turn an electrical generator.

But development of ocean thermal energy technology has lagged since the Energy Department pulled the plug in the 1990s on an experimental 217-kilowatt demonstration plant at the Natural Energy Laboratory in Hawaii.

Institute on ocean energy

3 Responses to “Ocean Power Plant”

  1. CuriousCat: World’s First Commercial-Scale Subsea Turbine
    June 30th, 2007 @ 2:31 pm

    SeaGen is four times as powerful as the world’s previous most powerful turbine, SeaFlow, which Marine Current Turbines has been operating off Lynmouth in Devon since 2003; SeaGen will form the basis for the commercial projects that will follow…

  2. CuriousCat: Generating Electricity from the Ocean
    September 18th, 2007 @ 7:12 pm

    Wave and tidal power could provide 3 percent of Britain’s electricity by 2020, according to the government-backed Carbon Trust…

  3. Piyasakdi Boonprakong
    July 7th, 2011 @ 10:04 am

    I would like to know more about ocean power
    plant.Please provide the information for existing plants.

    Thank you in advance for your kindness.

    Piyasakdi

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