EU supports 'underwater windmill' sea power project

By Brian Groom in London Copyright 1998 Financial Times (London) August 22, 1998

A British company is about to start a project backed by the European Union to build an "underwater windmill" that will test whether the power of the sea can provide an environmentally-friendly answer to the world's energy needs.

Hampshire-based IT Power has an Ecu 1m ($ 1.1m) grant from Brussels to build the world's first full-size marine current turbine connected to a national electricity grid. It is likely to be situated in Devon or Cornwall, in south-west England.

The company's partners are the University of Kassel in Germany; ITT Flight, a Swedish turbine and generator manufacturer; and Seacore, the Cornish engineering company.

Research by the UK government suggests that tidal currents around Britain's coast could provide up to 20 per cent of the country's power if a workable and cost-effective technology were developed.

Marine current schemes work differently from wave power or estuarial barrages. They are more like an underwater version of wind farms, exploiting currents that race through underwater channels and around headlands.

The pilot scheme involves building a turbine with blades 12m to 15m in diameter to generate up to 300kW, enough to supply a small village. It will sit about 30m below the waves on a steel pile sunk into the seabed, with a cable connecting it to the National Grid.

Tidal current schemes have been slow to take off because of the difficulty of building equipment that can withstand the sea's buffeting and corrosiveness, but global warming has sparked fresh interest in renewable energy schemes that avoid burning fossil fuels.

The offshore oil industry has also developed ways of engineering more durable structures and pinning them into holes drilled in the sea floor without using large amounts of concrete.

Design work starts on September 1. The turbine should be ready near the end of 2000. Oliver Paish, IT Power's senior engineer, said it was seeking backing from other companies.

IT Power needs a location near the shore where the water velocity is neither too fast nor too slow, with a grid connection close by, and which will not interfere with either shipping or coastline conservation.

Supporters believe subsea energy farms would not attract the same environmental protests as onshore wind farms, because only the transformer would show above the surface. Norwegian research, however, suggests clusters of turbines could slow currents, causing river mouths to silt up.

Commercial exploitation may be 15 years away. IT Power believes turbine clusters could generate power at about 6 pence (10c) per kilowatt hour, not far off the cost of wind power and possibly attractive enough for island communities, though nearly three times the cost of power from conventional stations. Mass production and technical advances could reduce it further.

Although IT Power's scheme may be the furthest advanced, Blue Energy of Vancouver has an ambitious plan to build a $ 100m, 30MW plant driven by currents in a channel between islands in the Philippines.

The scheme involves mounting turbines inside a steel and concrete fence, which depends on feasibility studies and government approval.

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