Thursday, July 17, 2008

SeaGen, the world’s first commercial-scale tidal turbine


SeaGen, the world’s first commercial-scale tidal turbine, located in Northern Ireland’s Strangford Lough and developed by British tidal energy company, Marine Current Turbines (MCT) of Bristol, has delivered electricity into the grid for the first time...

Below is an excerpt from the Guardian:
"The trial at Strangford Lough, in Northern Ireland, uses a device called SeaGen and generates power at 150kW. However, engineers have plans to increase power to 300kW by the end of the summer. When it is eventually running at full power SeaGen will have an output of 1,200 kW, enough for about 1,000 homes.............

"The best way to think of it is an underwater windmill," said Martin Wright, managing director of MCT. "There are big masses of water moving on the Earth's surface as a result of the gravitational attraction of the moon. Therefore you have streams occurring where you have accelerated flow."
Tidal generators harvest the energy of these moving streams with the added advantage that the resource is, unlike wind, predictable........."

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