Tidal/wave energy underappreciated
The New York Times had a nice story Thursday on wave energy technology. We basically get an overview of the technology, an update on where the innovation is at, and a sample of some of the projects currently in motion (so to speak). The article also raises some of the barriers to these projects, namely environmental groups that see massive turbines and structures put into the sea as a danger to fish and their surrounding ecosystems. Fair enough. Personally, I do like this technology and don’t believe it’s getting enough attention or funding compared to wind and solar. What’s great about wave/tide energy systems is that they offer baseload more predictable power supply that you can’t get with wind and solar.
In Canada, I’m happy to see a little attention to tidal power in the latest funding round by Sustainable Development Technology Canada. A Calgary-based company called New Energy Corporation Inc., along with partners Canoe Pass Tidal Energy Corp. and Focus Environmental, are putting in a 500 kilowatt tidal power system in a narrow channel between Maude Island and Ouadra Island along British Columbia’s west coast. “The technology to be demonstrated is New Energy’s EnCurrent vertical axis turbine, which employs vanes mounted parallel to a vertical shaft to extract energy from a moving stream of water regardless of its direction,” according to an SDTC description of the project.
SDTC funded a smaller 65 kilowatt tidal project back in July 2005 near Victoria, B.C., led by Vancouver’s Clean Current Power Systems. The goal of that initiative was to replace two diesel generators at a marine park with clean tidal power.
In June, a study by the Electric Power Research Institute concluded that the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia was among three top North American sites for tidal power potential. The study determined that clean power could be produced there at less than 6.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, competitive with natural gas and wind and far cheaper than solar and clean coal. Enough electricity could be produced to power more than 100,000 homes.
Of course, Canada already has a 20-megawatt tidal power generation station built in Nova Scotia during the early 1980s at Annapolis Royal. Russia and China have built similarly sized plants, while France has a 240-megawatt tidal plant. Not sure why we don’t see more of these things…
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
August 4th, 2006 at 9:24 am
You mention that wave/tidal qualify as baseload, but in reality tidal power is inappropriate for baseload power because of the lulls in output during the change in direction of the tide. Wave power is equally poor because the wave resource is quite variable.
Both technologies are still very expensive in terms of the levelised cost of electricity. There was a study recently that suggested several GW of generation would need to be installed before the learning curve could bring prices down to anything like competitive levels.
Don’t get me wrong – they are good technologies that need to be encouraged, but they are not there yet.
I’ve done some posts on my blog http://burrows.typepad.com that talk about the relative power costs of different renewable technologies. From what I can work out, the most likely tech to challenge fossil fuel power will be solar concentrators, although breakthrough technologies could change all this.
Cheers,
Tim.