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Le Club des Argonautes
David Levrat tells us about the OTEC pages on the French web site of Le Club des Argonautes. The author is the Acting Chairman of IOA, Michel Gauthier.
posted by bjelkeman at 17:39

Overview of NIOT
Philip Davies points us to an old magazine article [cached] in Frontline (India), which is a nice overview of the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) in India. Their OTEC effort figures prominently in the article.
posted by bjelkeman at 17:10

European fuel cell buss project
Today I went to a presentation by the Stockholm consortium (page in Swedish) which are testing fuel cell busses for public transport in Stockholm. The consortium is part of the European project Clear Urban Partners for Transport (CUTE), which we have written about before. The meeting was well attended with nearly 80 people from Swedish local government, energy companies, universities, automotive manufacturing and others.

The three busses in Stockholm are in regular traffic on line 66 and have according to everyone involved behaved above expectations. The only drawback is that it hasn't been really cold yet in Stockholm this winter, so they haven't been able to test the cold weather performance as much as they have wanted to do. The Swedish part of the project is due to shut down at the end of the year, after two years of testing and the Stockholm public transport (SL) says that DaimlerChrysler expect to have a serial production buss on offer to replace these busses in another three to five years. The current busses are essentially pilot project platforms and not designed from the ground up to be as efficient as possible. Improvements which were discussed were battery / fuel cell hybrid technology which would allow the busses to significantly benefit from the start stop nature of urban buss transport, as well as power-train upgrades to remove inefficiencies.
posted by bjelkeman at 15:39

IOA's web site gets a new home
The International OTEC/DOWA Association (IOA) has moved to a new web site with a new fresh design. The Acting Chairman of the IOA, Michel Gauthier, invites IOA members to "submit new articles, announcements and comments about OTEC and DOWA". The IOA newsletters are of course still available to read.
posted by bjelkeman at 14:03

Sea Solar Power at APEC Energy Working Group?
David Levrat points us to the Twenty-Eighth Meeting of the APEC EWG, Port Douglas, Australia, 3-4 November, 2004 from the APEC Energy Working Group. The one section which is of particular interest for us is the Expert Group on New & Renewable Energy Technologies [cached] which among other things say:

USA: Monitoring and Assessing the Design, Operation and Performance of an
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) Project (Self-funded)
The purpose of this project is to monitor and assess the design, operation and performance of an ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) project proposed for implementation in an APEC-member economy. The land-based OTEC design will be capable of producing both electricity and desalinated water on a large scale, using only solar energy from the tropical ocean. Valuable by-products, such as fish, vegetables and industrial gases offer additional potential opportunities. Discussions are underway with an APEC economy to begin implementation of an OTEC system by late-2004. The project developer has obtained funds to implement one or more 10MW OTEC systems in an APEC member economy. All that is needed from the host economy is to sign a contract to purchase the resulting water and electricity at current competitive market rates.

This sounds very much like it would be Sea Solar Power. They are the only US based OTEC developer with funds that I know of. The description also fits their business model.
posted by bjelkeman at 14:43

Desalination OTEC pilot plant in Chennai?
The Indian government refers to what appears to be an OTEC powered desalination plant in a year end review press release [cached]. Specifically it says:

Mitigating drinking water problem Islands and coastal rural areas lack sources of fresh water and often times have limited sources of power. One solution devised indigenously is to desalinate water by using the temperature difference between the surface and deep sea-layers. A 5000 litres per day low thermal desalination plant was inaugurated at chennai in June 2004 . A 100,000 litres per day low thermal desalination plant is under installation at Kavarati. Deployment of barge mounted desalination plants is also being considered.

As usual there is very little on the NIOT site, so it is hard to evaluate their progress.
posted by bjelkeman at 20:11

Deep ocean water - A natural resource
Whilst travling for information I found a nice article in the July 2004 OSTI newsletter (Volume 2, Issue 5) [cached] (Ocean Science and Technology for Islands, NIOT, India) about deep ocean water resources, written by Mr. Saravanane. It lists OTEC, cold water agriculture, ice production, air conditioning and lithium recovery among other things.
posted by bjelkeman at 20:07