The latest green technology developments
Underwater tidal energy convertor
After some chuckling about how the chimney sweeps from our European neighbours are going to be carrying out EPCs, lets take a look at the new technologies that can help the drive to reduce CO2 emissions and the reliance on coal, oil, gas and so on.
Most people are familiar with the concept of windfarms, even if they haven't actually seen one. Well now its underwater tidal energy convertors!
A commercial-scale tidal generator was connected to the national grid on July 17th in Northern Ireland.
The SeaGen turbine was developed by Bristol-based organisation Marine Current Turbines (MCT) and tested at the Stangford Lough site. SeaGen has been has been licensed for a maximum installed duration of 5 years. When operating at full capacity, the turbine is expected to produce 1,200 kilowatts (kW) of energy - enough to power 1,000 homes.
Its just astonishing that as an island nation, more hasn't been done to harness the freely available renewable resources, I guess thats the benefit of a market-driven economy then? We'll develop electric cars for the mass market and build them out of the last remaining drops of oil.
Some helpful linkage for this interesting topic...
- The British Wind Energy Association are the representatives of the commercial companies working in wind and offshore renewable technologies.
- DETI study on Tidal Resource, this study was completed in 2003 and reviewed the tidal energy resource around the coast of Northern Ireland.
- EPRI Tidal In Stream Energy Conversion (TISEC) Project An interesting web site providing reports on the activities on tidal energy conversion in the USA.
Biomass Plant
Maybe its just me but I haven't really come across too many of these in my wider reading but happily we now have an announcement that there is to be a new biomass plant to built in Fife which will come onstream in 2011. The plant will use discarded wooden furniture and new timber from trees to produce 45MW of electricity. Most of the steam and power supplies will serve the Tullis Russell paper mill, which previously was dependent on supplies from a coal-fired power plant. The paper mill's CO2 emissions will fall by 70 per cent to about 20,000 tonnes annually.
Onwards and upwards it seems, plenty more green technology coming, the developers who remain after this crash in the UK had better start upping their game rather than waiting for the ever-revolving change of government and political arguing to save their bacon. We have the Code for Sustainable Homes being implemented over the coming years, and a commercial version cannot now be far behind it.
Labels: Green-Technology-Developments Underwater-tidal-energy-convertor Biomass-Plant
posted by Neil Kurz at
00:02
1 Comments:
The astonishing thing is that real time generation from tidal streams is poor engineering practice and yet the author seems to think that it is brilliant!
We can say that at the nadir of Neeps the power available is approximately 1/8 of the power during Spring tides.
Also, burning wood laughingly renamed 'biomass' does not help the planet one iota.
We are on a dead end road with both of these technolgies.
The only way of reducing our carbon footprint is to use renewables (not biomass) to heat water at existing coal fired power stations thereby reducing the amount of coal burned to produce electricity when it is demanded.
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