DOE grants $1 million for ocean energy research

Green Tech
March 17, 2010 11:01 AM PDT

by Candace Lombardi

A Lockheed Martin map with DOE data shows areas with the greatest difference between surface temperature and the temperature at 1,000 meters deep. Areas in purple designate coastlines that may be most feasible as energy sources.

(Credit: Lockheed Martin/US Department of Energy)

The U.S. Department of Energy has given two grants totaling $1 million to Lockheed Martin to determine the feasibility of tapping into the ocean's hot and cold spots to save energy.

Instead of looking at how to harness wave and tidal power, as the Seadog and Oyster projects have been doing, the grants require Lockheed Martin's scientists and engineers to determine if they could take advantage of the ocean's varying temperatures.

The first part of the grant is to develop software and tools for determining which thermal areas of the ocean have the greatest potential for being tapped as renewable-energy sources. Specifically, it will look at Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) technology, exploiting the large temperature difference between the ocean's solar-warmed layer and a cold sink to generate electricity.

But that first grant is not restricted to OTEC for the purpose of generating electricity. The tool will also be tuned to find oceanic cold sinks near coastlines that could be tapped as a source for air conditioner coolant.

The method, which is already being testing in Honolulu, Hawaii, is called SWAC (seawater air conditioning), district cooling, or DSW (deep seawater) cooling. Cold, deep seawater is pumped to a cooling station on shore and used as air conditioning coolant. The water is then redistributed into the ocean after circulating through the system.

The second grant seems to be going to the number crunchers.

It's for Lockheed Martin to determine (based on the information they gather about the ocean's hot and cold spots) the scalability, cost, performance, and ultimate potential for large-scale use and commercialization of SWAC and OTEC technology.

Comments

by solitare_pax March 17, 2010 11:50 AM PDT
The second grant is more wasted dollars - anyone who has followed energy research knows that the last civilian nuclear power plant built in the U.S. in New Hampshire uses ocean water to cool the reactor using 1970's technology. It ought to be a simple matter to adopt that off the shelf technology to keep buildings cool. Putting a canopy of solar cells above any roof ought to help keep their building cooler and generate power in a place like Hawaii too.
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by DosEquisXX March 17, 2010 12:22 PM PDT

SWAC is currently being used at the Intercontinental Resort in Bora Bora (French Polynesia). It's a pretty cool system. It doesn't use any electricity to pump the water from the ocean floor. It uses the surface tension properties of water to naturally have the water flow up the pipe and then back out to see. They said it lowered their energy bills by 90% plus the added benefit of being environmentally friendly.

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