The Oil Drum Australia has a great post this week about tidal power construction all across the world, including the attractive ‘Energy Island’ concept pictured. The article talks about tidal, ocean current and wave projects from the UK, US, New Zealand, Taiwan and Canada, amongst many others. The UK could potentially derive 25% of its power just from wave energy, not to mention its huge resources of tidal power in the Severn Estuary and on the coasts of Scotland. Also discussed is OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion), which creates power from the heat differential between warm surface water and cold deep water.
In other news, Oil has never been higher priced in history than it is today, at $102.08 a barrel. Looks like we’re going to need a lot of this alternative energy supply. One of the projects mentioned at the bottom of the Oil Drum article is for floating islands of power generation producing hydrogen to fuel passing ships. Neat.