“Lawnmower” Tidal Turbines Could Produce Electricity at Half the Price
by Matthew McDermott, Brooklyn, NY on 09. 5.08
By some estimates, the UK could generate 5-15 gigawatts of electricity using tidal turbines. Photo: Franny Dynamite.
About six weeks ago we reported on the world’s first commercial-scale tidal turbine, SeaGen, beginning the first stage of its operations. SeaGen, like most other tidal turbines works a bit like a wind turbine tuned on its side, spinning as water moves past the blades and generating electricity.
However, a new tidal turbine design unveiled yesterday by engineers from Oxford University, which The Guardian describes as being a “lawnmower” design (probably not the best image, even if accurate in form), looks to change the shape of wave power:
Say It With Me, Transverse Horizontal Axis Water Turbine
At full size, a Transverse Horizontal Axis Water Turbine (Thawt) rotor would be 10m in diameter and 60m long. Connecting two of these together with a generator in the middle could produce around 12MW of power, enough for 12,000 average family homes.The Thawt device is mechanically far less complicated than anything available today, meaning it would cost less to build and maintain. "The manufacturing costs are about 60% lower, the maintenance costs are about 40% lower," said Malcolm McCulloch, head of the electrical power group at Oxford's engineering department.
Installation Costs About Half Present Tidal Turbines
McCulloch went on to say that Thawts (there’s got to be a better name for these...) could be installed for a bit more than half the cost of present tidal turbine designs: £1.7 million per megawatt, versus about £3 million per megawatt for existing turbines.
More at :: The Guardian.
Second image: The Guardian
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You always worry these will stagnate tidal regions and warm up the water. However, it might also cut coastal erosion by taking energy out of the system.
Hey, I know I'm just super lazy and all, but it would be pretty awesome if you guys had a nice chart of cost per MW for different electricity generation technologies. Go a step further and it could have projected costs via different advances that have been announced.
It sounds cool, but there are a lot of unanswered questions. How to deal with the corrosion issue? How to prevent the generator from becoming completely encrusted with barnacles? What's the environmental impact of these? Obviously, it's got the potential to kill marine life. And 5 GW as a total resource doesn't sound like much. The US is on track to install twice as much wind in 2008 alone. I would have expected more power to be produced than that.
I think this will find an application perhaps providing some baseload power for coastal nations, but probably as a primary power source for island states and nations that get electricity primarily from diesel generators now, like Tahiti, Hawaii, and the Falkland islands.
To combat barnacles, they could use copper plating, or copper particle bearing paint. Barnacles can't grow on copper or silver because both of these are "biostatic" and resist the growth and bonding of microbes, molusks, and crustacean larvae such as barnacle cyprids, but silver is prohibitively expensive.
Great idea. Simple to build and strong, and you can hire divers to periodically clean the equipmen = more Green jobs.
Copper? Great. Once the crackheads hear about that, they'll be stripping them down as fast as they can build them :P
No tidal power is viable in the US because permitting is virtually impossible. Peeps in tidal energy research have been talking about this for several years now. The technology doesn't matter if you can't install it.
Wave power can be a bit easier to permit if it is far enough off shore, but then you have higher installation, transmission, and maintenance costs.
There is a reason utilities build fossil fuel plants: they can be reliably permitted.
@JSDryer,
Because of their design they are likely going to spin slower than the the Vertical Axis sea mills -- and if I am understanding the mechanics of the device correctly the directional movement of the blades should assist most marine life in going over top, rather than going through or under the blades.