Perhaps someday – if, thirty or fifty years from now, wave energy converters and tidal stream generators become commonplace – it will be a largely forgotten blip in the sector’s long evolution from notion to reality. But in the here and now, marine energy is suffering. The latest sign: The European Marine Energy Centre in… Keep reading →
Cowboys, frontier grit, accented English, and wild, wide open spaces are just a few of the similarities shared by Texas and Australia. Both places also have an energy-water problem. But, the good news for Texas is that it’s not too late for us to learn from Australia’s mistakes – and a few successes, too. In… Keep reading →
A U.S.-backed effort in Florida to explore the energy-producing potential of ocean currents has reeled in a private player – the Swedish startup Minesto, which uses a winged, turbine-tipped device that gathers energy by darting around underwater, kite-like, in a figure-eight pattern. Is there any real hope for it? There might be – but it… Keep reading →
Industry leaders gathered last week at the Global Marine Renewable Energy Conference in Seattle, mindful that wave and tidal are clean energy’s infants, on the cusp of toddlerhood, struggling to get up on their feet, while older siblings wind and solar sprint to new records. Nobody has lost faith that the vast energy of the… Keep reading →
In parched California, desalination of seawater is becoming an increasingly attractive option for potable water. In Saudi Arabia, more than two dozen desal plants already provide some 70 percent of the water used in cities. Australia, too, has in recent years embraced salt removal as a path to assuring the availability of drinking water. You… Keep reading →
On Monday it was announced that Deep Green, an underwater kite technology that turns low velocity ocean currents into electricity, has been successfully deployed. The underwater kite technology developed by Minesto for testing in Northern Ireland is a part of a swelling industry that is working to create the most efficient way to access the… Keep reading →
Last fall, the imminent deployment of a fully approved wave energy buoy off Oregon had a lot of people excited. Even the New York Times busted out a long story as Oregon held its fingers crossed that its investment in wave energy might blossom, sending energy to the coast and growing jobs there and elsewhere in… Keep reading →
A new revenue-sharing bill – the FAIR Act – would enable coastal states to receive a share of offshore energy revenue and put onshore renewable energy on the same scale as onshore fossil energy to ensure equitable revenue-sharing to encourage clean energy efforts.
On March 20, Senators Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) introduced the Fixing America’s Inequity with Revenues (FAIR) Act to provide states with a share of revenue from energy developed on federal land and waters. Under the FAIR Act, coastal states would be entitled to 27.5% of revenue from offshore energy developments, including fossil, wind, and wave energy, and an additional 10% if they establish funds to support clean energy and energy conservation programs. The federal government would receive the remaining 62.55% to address budget deficits. Keep reading →
Could New York City’s rivers power its famous lights?
A new tidal energy project located in New York City’s East River has the potential to create electricity that would be one of the first commercial installations of “hydrokinetic” projects in the US. The wave and tidal energy business, which is still in early stages of development, has been divided between large-scale installations and a focus on cheaply-deployed units that could be more easily installed to take advantage of the natural movement of waves and tides. Keep reading →
Trying to find the silver bullet in energy is not an easy task. Developing a power source that is clean and widely available, yet also cheaper and more reliable than fossil fuels or intermittent wind and solar has led to a great deal of expensive research but few commercially successful technologies.
Proponents of ocean power, in which converters capture the power of the constant energy provided by high and low waves and tide flows, believe they have the answer – but pricing, infrastructure prejudiced to existing generation types and lack of data all form robust challenges for the still-small sector. Keep reading →
