Blue Is The New Green: How Oceans Could Power The FutureThe antiquated Morro Bay plant is part of a pattern of seaside plants closing due to a combination of stricter environmental regulations coupled with California’s requirement that 33 percent of electricity in the state come from renewable sources by 2020. Two companies have filed preliminary permits with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to test wave energy projects off the coast of Morro Bay, a town of about 10,000 people north of Los Angeles. Both projects would use the defunct plant as a much-needed transmission hub to push energy to the grid and from there to consumers throughout the region.
“If we aren’t able to use Morro Bay, there are other shore-based power plants shutting down along the coastline,” said Paul Grist, president and chairman of Archon Energy, one of the companies applying for a FERC permit. “They can’t meet the Renewable Portfolio Standard and they suck in and spew out millions of gallons of water.”
Dynegy, the owner of the power plant, is the other company that applied for a FERC permit. A Houston-based utility company with around 13,000 megawatts (MW) of nationwide power generation capacity, their February 6 application with FERC came several months after Archon’s. If their project tests successfully and goes on to get the two dozen or so licenses and permits that would be needed, it would eventually generate 650 MW of power and cost more than $1 billion to build.
“Dynegy filed their permit many months after we did,” Grist said. “Our goal was to use that transmission corridor to the coast and Dynegy basically followed. Their application is further towards land than ours. I’ve talked with them and we’re going to try to work together and help each other out as much as we can.”
Archon Energy, co-founded by Grist in 1999 when he was 20 years old, is a small, independent power producer focusing on next generation technologies with minimal environmental impacts. In the fall of 2013, the company filed for a FERC permit to pursue testing on a one-by-fifteen mile site several miles offshore that would cost about $1 million. Grist said they are waiting for preliminary permits to start investing significant capital and holding consultations with stakeholders, including local community members and environmental groups. However, he’s had his eye on hydrokinetics — the production of energy from the flow of moving water — for a decade.
“There’s a lot of technology happening in wave energy conversion,” Grist said. “Wave energy will be coming of age in the immediate future.”
thinkprogressOther Renewables Make Ocean Thermal Energy Plants ViableWhile experiments with OTEC have persisted in fits and starts ever since the late 19th century, they have been continually hampered by a number of debilitating factors, including the difficulty of pumping huge amounts of cold water from the ocean’s depth and the fact that the process requires a temperature gap of at least 20 degrees Celsius to work, confining it to a thin belt of tropical and sub-tropical areas around the equator.
Recent scientific advances promise to overcome these hurdles however, and make OTEC a more economic and practical source of renewable energy.
Scientists are focusing in particular on combining OTEC with other forms of renewable energy, such as solar power or geo-thermal power, to enhance its potential and render it effective in a broader range of environmental conditions.
Paola Bombarda of the Polytechnic University of Milan has used computer models to prove that solar collectors have the potential to radically increase the power output of OTEC plants, by heating up warm ocean water to increase the temperature gap.
In a paper published by Bombarda in the Journal of Engineering for Gas Turbines and Power, she found that even cheap and rudimentary solar collectors, consisting of a mechanism as simple as lenses or tubes for trapping heat, are capable of tripling the daytime electricity output of OTEC plants.
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