Tidal Power

1

• Tidal Power
• For a Sustainable New York

Libby Murphy
2
Outline

• Introduction
• Innovative Hydro
• The Northeast Region
• New York City Model
• Summary

3
Site Evaluation
4
Kinetic Hydro

• Only one in-current facility in the world
  (Hammerfest)
• Less invasive than potential hydro
• No basin needed
• Turbine inserted directly into strong current
• Power extracted is proportional to the cube of
  the velocity
• 4 m/s yields 8 x power than 2 m/s
• 1st tier tidal sites are far more profitable
  than 2nd tier

Existing grid-tied tidal facilities
Gorlov Helical Turbine
5
Tidal Energy 5 Unmatched Advantages

• Environmentally Friendly miniscule impact per
  unit energy
• Invisible completely silent and submerged
  underwater
• Highly Predictable the tides are precisely
  calculated
• Material Efficient water is 1,000 times denser
  than air
• A Huge Resource if less than 0.1 of the
  renewable energy in the oceans could be
  converted to electricity, it would satisfy the
  present world demand for energy five times
  over. (Marine Foresight Panel Report, House of
  Commons, London. Office of Science and
  Technology. May 1997)

6
Tidal Power EnvironmentallyFriendly Energy

• Tidal systems require no fuel and produce no
  pollution.
• Small impact per unit energy, water, which is
  1,000 times as dense as air, is a powerful
  resource that requires minimal space and
  materials for maximum output.
• Benign relative to conventional power plants,
  eg. the power plants along the Hudson River use
  up to five billion gallons of river's water
  daily, returning it up to 34F warmer and killing
  40 percent of the river's young striped bass
  (Super 2007)
• Fish friendly, open-flow turbines with blade
  tip-speed ratios gt 1, fish and marine animals are
  actually deflected from the turbulence created by
  the systems, rather than sucked in as one might
  envision.

7
A Huge Energy Resource
Locally
and globally
8
Renewable Energy Comparison
9
Future Large-scale Comparison
10
Competitive Generation Costs
Compared with traditional, non-renewables
(calculated from EPRI 2005 study)
11
Renewable Portfolio Standards
27 states plus the District of Columbia have RPS
mandating a certain renewable energy
generation by a specified year.
(EERE 2008)
All 9 of the Northeastern states have RPS goals.
Compiled by author from EERE 2008 and EIA 2006
12
Issued FERC Preliminary Permits in the
Northeast, USA
13
Why NYC?

• Huge power load
• Exceeds 8,000,000 kW
• Enormous untapped local resource
• East River and Long Island Sound
• Energy independence
• Step up as leaders in sustainability and
  innovative design

14
STELLA Model

• Parameters
• Tidal current
• NYC load
• Tidal power
• System Scale
• E from grid
• Outputs
• MWh tidal
• CO2 diver.
• Revenue
• RECS
• Net-meter.
• E purchase

15
Results
Graph showing NYC load on July 5, 2007, power
need from the conventional power grid and
estimated tidal power that could have been
produced with a 800 MW system. Notice significant
lowering of the grid where tidal power is at its
greatest (Murphy 2008).
16
Results

• Feasible tidal array of 800 MW would
• Significantly lessen the citys reliance on
  electricity from the grid
• Daily produce 7,622 megawatt hours
• Prevent emission of over 3,250 tons of CO2
• Generate over 739,000 in revenues from RECs and
  net-metering

17
Summary

• Tidal power
• Is a superior renewable energy
• Has an enormous resource in and around NYC
• Development for NYC could greatly reduce the
  citys carbon footprint and reliance on the grid.