Expert: Tidal power can't succeed overnight
3/4/2013Tidal power development globally is at the stage wind energy was four decades ago, an industry pioneer in the United Kingdom says.
Peter Fraenkel said Friday he thinks underwater turbine technology will become commercially viable in the same way wind mills have.
“You can’t go from a blank sheet of paper to a one megawatt-scale machine, running reliably in the water, in one great leap,” he said in an interview from London.
“In my view, you need to go step by step. There’s a kind of logical order for doing things.”
Fraenkel and Martin Wright, co-founders of Marine Current Turbines Inc., will be in Nova Scotia next week to deliver a series of lectures and participate in workshops on tidal development.
Their visit, sponsored primarily by the province, includes a public lecture on Monday at Halifax’s Dalhousie University. Their talk is at 5:30 p.m. in Room 1020 of the Kenneth C. Rowe Management Building.
The veteran tidal developers co-founded the United Kingdom company in 1999. Fraenkel was its technology director and Wright its managing director.
Marine Current Turbines was acquired by German conglomerate Siemens AG last year and the duo are now partners in Fraenkel-Wright Ltd., an engineering consulting firm.
The crowning jewel of Fraenkel and Wright’s tenure at Marine Current Turbines was the development of the world’s first commercially operating in-stream turbine. The 1.2-megawatt SeaGen machine has been producing tidal power in Northern Ireland’s Strangford Narrows since 2008.
“A joke I usually make is, it’s not necessarily that we’re particularly clever,” said Fraenkel, an engineer. “ It was just that we started before everybody else.”
A few other tidal developers in the U.K. and United States have since developed other in-stream machines, but SeaGen remains the largest one hooked up to the grid anywhere.
After five years in operation, the SeaGen project produces enough power, on average, to provide electricity to 1,800 homes in the U.K.
When Fraenkel and Wright were at the helm, the U.K. developer also jumped on board with a tidal demonstration project in the Bay of Fundy near Parrsboro. The company is partnered with Minas Basin Pulp and Power of Hantsport.
Although he’s no longer part of that venture, Fraenkel said he thinks developers are getting closer to finding a machine that will work amid the world’s higest tides.
“There are some quite tough technical challenges,” he said of the test site in Minas Basin.
“But on the other side of the coin, it’s an incredibly good site — the speed of the water, the size of the site — it’s huge. When something feasible comes along to exploit it, it could be a very big electricity generator.”
The Marine Current Turbines founder said his former company might have been able to put a turbine in the water here in 2011 or last year if it were able to use the existing SeaGen technology.
“The main difference is that in Northern Ireland we were dealing with a tidal range of about three metres, compared with 14 metres,” the SeaGen inventor said. “It needs a different machine. We can use the same Lego bricks but you stick them together in a different way.”
Meanwhile, Energy Minister Charlie Parker said the province expects the next test turbine to be in the water in 2014 or 2015.
“The department has asked all developers to submit updated development plans once the developmental feed-in-tariff has been set,” he said in a statement earlier this week.
The tariff, which will be determined by the Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board, is the amount developers will be paid for their electricity while the technology is in its early stages.
(The Chronicle Herald)
