China's 1st System of a Giant 10GW Marine Energy Project
[social_buttons]
China is clearly taking a lead on solar and wind energy. However, in the smaller but growing field of marine energy, it has been somewhat invisible. That is changing now.
Israeli marine renewables firm SDE Energy has announced that it will be completing construction of a 1MW marine power plant in China by the end of April. But there is much more in the pipeline.
SDE, with financing from the Israeli government has built eight model marine power plants. Now, it is ready to do more and wants to expand rapidly in the Chinese market.
According to SDE, wave energy could potentially supply four times more energy per square meter than wind energy in China. China is looking interested.
This power plant is the first of a 10GW marine energy project for the coastline of China.
Almost every new marine energy project I see seems to use its own unique method for generating electricity. This one does as well. The system involves a floating buoy in the sea attached to a breakwater. When waves hit the breakwater, the buoy moves up and down and drive a series of cylinders containing hydraulic oil and pistons. The pressurized oil then gets directed to an electrical generator that produces energy.
With a number of heavily populated coastal cities in China, marine energy like this can be used relatively close to where it is generated without needing much investment in transmission infrastructure.
This project is in Dongping Town, Yangjiang City in the Guangdong Province in South China and the total cost for building it is about $700,000.
SDE Marine Power Projects Around the World Soon?
This is SDE’s second Asian deal. It “signed a deal with India’s Om Se Mantra Powergen and the government of the Indian state of Gujarat last year” to build a 5MW marine power plant using the same technology as well.
In 2008, the company also announced that it had signed a deal with an unnamed African country to build 100MW worth of marine power projects within 25 years. And SDE says that it “holds Letters of Intent and orders from state leaders and electric companies in an approximate amount of US $3 billion dollars.”
Image Credit: Thomas Fan via flickr/CC license
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
CleanTechnica Holiday Wish Book
Our Latest EVObsession Video
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
I’d like to see if this approach scales up to much larger systems. Both of these projects are quite small.
well if you accept the figure of $700,000 for total construction cost, assume running costs to be negligible then over a ten your life time cost of electricity is less than 1 cent per kWh a much cheaper cost than coal fired plants. With a smaller environmental impact. So any argument that going green will bankrupt the nation is non sense.
As for the person/s claiming we need oil for things other than fuel, YES indeed we do which is a very good reason to stop using it as fuel. Total oil use for non fuel purposes is less than 0.01% of oil production. By the way there are alternatives for transport that do not rely on fossil fuels as well. AND are economic. Existing technology tried tested and been in use for a long time very successfully.
Dependence on fossil fuels is not necessary or desirable. So who is blind and closed minded exactly those who refuse to look around and see what is happening? or those who are looking and finding better solutions?
Dear Zachary Shahan,
I found the location “the city of Dong Ping in the Guangzhou province “is not exactly correct. I think this is not your fault, i saw this error in almost all other English resources I checked right now.
You know Guangzhou is the capital city of Guangdong province, which is my second hometown. The right location should be: Dongping Town, Yangjiang City, Guangdong Province in South China.
Anyway, I enjoy reading your articles and your website. Thank you!
Cheers,
Xiangdian
Climate change is a global problem, and yet each one of us has the power to make a difference. Even small changes in our daily behaviour can help prevent greenhouse gas emissions without affecting our quality of life. In fact, they can help save us money!