Tidle turbines NYC

As we will run out of gas and oil someday we will have to find new ways of generating energy. As we are looking at new ways we will have to look at options and technology which is green and will not pollute our planet in ways traditional technology is doing.

One of the options we have is making use of the tide. The tide is a given thing and will always be available. The moment the tide is no longer available we will also not have to worry about not having energy as this will implicate that or the sun or the moon has gone.

Currently Discovery Channel is running a show named Engineering Earth and one of the topics they covered was a project which is executed by a company called Verdant Power. Verdant power is placing tide turbines as a test in the east river in New York City.

Even do some issues are still to be solved it can become one of the possible new sources of energy to our lives. It is clean and it will be available until the end of times. By placing and mounting the turbines on the riverbed they can make use of the full power of the current.

Plans are available to place 300 of the turbines on the riverbed and by doing so they could power 10% of the current power need of the city. A downside of this technology is that if you place them in shallow rivers you will harm the option to make use of boats on the entire wide of the river. However you could use trains powered by the same energy source instead of making use of a boat.

Also a downside can be possible damage to marine live, it could harm the current marine live however as we have seen in many places nature has a strong way of adopting and possible it can and will adapt to this new environment.

Picture by Verdant Power Inc.

The project run by Verdant Power Inc. is called the RITE project. The rite project has a ambitious timeline.

* Phase 1 (2002 – 2006): Prototype Testing
* Phase 2 (2006 – 2008): Demonstration
* Phase 3 (2009 – 2012): MW-Scale Build-Out

Currently phase 2 is completed and the rite project is the first array of tidal turbines connected to the main power grid.

Tags: green

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 at 10:55 am and is filed under Green Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.