In an effort to bring clean, renewable energy to some of the world's more remote islands — many of which are powered by old diesel generators — a pan-European consortium of seven companies has designed a device capable of turning seawater into electricity.
The Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, or OTEC, technology consists of three main parts that are being built all over the world: a cold-water riser pipe, which is being fabricated in Austria, a cylindrical hull, which is being built in the Canary Islands (a Spanish autonomous community, where the OTEC will be assembled and tested), and a gimbal connection point.
Once the entire OTEC prototype is complete, it will be installed on the Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands, a little under two miles off the coast. There, it will be tested in harsh ocean conditions for one year. The OTEC is designed to be disconnected if conditions get too harsh and moved closer to shore until the weather clears up.
"This prototype will provide us with the perfect opportunity [to] test our cylindrical hull and gimbal solutions in 20m equivalent waves and hone our offshore connection and disconnection procedure allowing us to maximize asset lifetime and availability even in storm prone regions," said Sam Johnston, lead engineer at Global OTEC, one of the partners on the project.
The OTEC works by using the heat from warm surface seawater to power a turbine that generates electricity. It also uses cold deep water to condense the working fluid that powers the turbine, creating a self-sustaining closed-loop system.
Island nations are among the most vulnerable to the extreme weather conditions caused by the overheating of our planet, driven in large part by our reliance on dirty energy. However, they are also among the most difficult to bring clean energy infrastructure to. The OTEC seeks to help solve both of those problems at once.
Other attempts to bring clean energy to islands include the island of El Hierro, also in the Canary Islands, which is on its way to becoming 100% energy self-sufficient thanks to a wind-pumped hydropower plant, and Laindeha, Indonesia, which recently began providing individual off-grid solar panel systems.
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