A Norwegian company has begun installing a 1.5MW prototype tidal-energy plant featuring turbines constructed with wooden blades.
Hydra Tidal will moor the floating power plant – known as Morild – to the seabed of Gimsøystraumen marine channel in Nordland County.
The turbine blades, which are made of laminated pine, are a novelty for a modern turbine-blade design as wood has not been used for such an application for decades.
Yet Hydra Tidal extols the use of wood for this application because it is naturally porous and homogenous material – so it has better mechanical and hydrological characteristics than current conventional materials, such as composites and steel.
The major challenge for Hydra Tidal has been the assembly process, but the company claims to have found a solution.
The Morild power plant will be assembled on land and then towed to its operating location for installation. Later, when maintenance is needed, it can be detached and floated to the surface for repair.
Hydra Tidal is receiving funding for two projects sponsored by the Research Council of Norway. One project is studying Morild’s wood components at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) laboratories in Trondheim and will verify the company’s findings.
The other project involves testing the effects of extreme environmental conditions on the entire Morild construction. The objective is to examine, test and analyse how such conditions affect a floating facility for converting the energy of slow coastal currents, tidal streams and ocean currents.
The projects will culminate in a full-scale test in the water in June 2010. Development of the concept has cost roughly NOK125m (£14m) over the last 10 years, funded primarily by industrial participants and investors.
Not much data provided really but I welcome intelligent use of nature in the energy sources and getting further from nuclear owing to the politics and other menaces. One of those menaces will be vulnerability to the unfortunate upsurge in predominenetly western international provocation into terroism and revenge where demolishing power sources in the ocean might seem to require husge investments in security, which granted might be facilitated by using the generated power itself in a “shield”..but then, what of the side effects on marine life?
I see even more pollution of the oceans than we continue to create being a vital factor, that leakage currents cannot affect fish or the micro-organisms so recently highlighted…at any depth…and that we do not make an utterly irresponsible junkyard of the sea in service and in operation and in other matters as we have permitted the USA (or anyone else) to make in outer space and at the polar caps.
Let’s not with incomplete judgement trade off improvement for further disaster as we are doing with carbon credits.
One area no one I have spoken with seems to have any ideas or feelings about apart from a sudden vagueness and mumbling is what will our uses of sun wind and sea do in terms of upsetting normal patterns and results were we not to be using them…I am not talking of getting out of one “dirty” energy form into a cleaner one” but in further intervening in natures creations and evolution of the planet.
Do 50 million wind generators alter wind currents, rain patterns, does solar reflection and higher temperature radiation from panels alter temperatures rain patterns and wind patterns, will millions of undersea devices using energy and creating heat disturb normal currents and the practicality and great possibility in pollution with encrustation are issues I wonder about. Whilst banned now ,perhaps far too late, in some countries antifouling chemicals are liquids which may be as irresponsibly used as oil dumping in Vanuatu and Australia and elsewhere, as irresponsible as what I very much doubt are “accidental” losses of millions of tons of oil polluting our oceans and engaging us in huge costsly and partly effective clean-ups then adding detergents as another polluter.Yes it’s a caring for the sea but it’s one always after the event.
Considering the industrial and commercial disasters born of covetousness and greed and conspiracy I think we ought to soundly look at the combination of the effects of using solar wind and tide on this planet so many seem to care so little about, see only profit now, and not just imagine as usual that nature will do our bidding and if it will not it can ‘go to hell”. I’d like to hear scientific views on my conversational questions here. Voia!