TAIPEI, Taiwan (3 July 2007) -- The government is now discussing the possibility of large-scale ocean current power generation, utilizing the strong Kuroshio current off the east coast of Taiwan to generate up to 1.68 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, officials at the Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD) said yesterday. The project task force, led by Chen Fa-lin, director of the Energy and Environment Research Laboratory under the Industrial Technology Research Institute, is working on fine-tuning the guidelines, which will be presented to CEPD senior officials next month or in September. Trial After the project gets the green-light, the first step would involve setting up a five-megawatt marine turbine off the nation's east coast on a trial basis, with the goal of testing both related technologies and power-generating efficiency, council officials said, adding that it hoped the project could proceed to the next stage in three years. "Current power generation is not a new idea," officials said. "Countries like Britain, Canada, Norway and Australia all have experience in deploying offshore marine turbines with capacities ranging from one megawatt to eight megawatts to support the electricity demand of hundreds to thousands of households," they said. Suitable site "The problem is not the technology itself but how to locate a suitable site -- with a current strong enough, an undersea shelf not too deep and a distance short enough to achieve power supply efficiency," they said. Based on the surveys done by the National Taiwan University, the sea area of some 6,000km2 between Taitung and the outlying Green Island in the Pacific Ocean appears to meet all the requirements, they said. They added that the maximum potential capacity there exceeds 1.68 trillion kilowatt-hours per year, compared with the nation's current annual demand of electricity of only about 98 billion kilowatt-hours. | | Marine turbines are installed on buoys and driven by tidal and ocean currents rotating the turbine at between 10 and 20 rpm.  View larger imageLower emissions According to the estimates of the project task force, a given site of 25km2 located in the "shallow, high-speed zone" could support the deployment of 1,000 one-megawatt marine turbines, which would have a peak capacity of 1,000 megawatts: equal to the output of the nation's second nuclear power plant. Chen, the project leader, said that once the turbines enter commercial operation, the nation's coal power plants could be retired, while the nuclear power generators could be used as a backup system, resulting in a great reduction in the nation's total carbon dioxide emissions. SOURCE - CNASCUBA FORUMDISCUSS THIS TOPIC - Dive in and have your say at Scuba ForumCDNN Related NewsUK - Powered by tides: Eco-friendly underwater 'windmills' |
