Abstract Ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) is a marine renewable energy technology with the potential to provide baseload power to island communities in tropical regions. Large volumes of warm and cold water are required to drive the electricity-producing cycle. This creates a risk, particularly at the warm water intake, for the impingement and entrainment of organisms. This paper provides an update on the progress of a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy that seeks to estimate the potential impacts of a warm water intake being considered for a potential OTEC project in Kauai, Hawaii. A 9-month, site-specific biological field sampling program has recently been completed at the OTEC site under consideration in Kauai.The intent of the field sampling program was to generate a baseline characterization of the species and life stages of ichthyoplankton present in the areas where the warm water intake may be located for the potential OTEC facility. This baseline characterization data will aid in the siting, selection, and design of the best intake technology for the warm water intake. It will also provide data useful for estimating the potential impacts of an intake at this location on the organisms present.
The EPRI-DOE Conference on Environmentally-Enhanced Hydropower Turbines was a component of a larger project. The goal of the overall project was to conduct the final developmental engineering required to advance the commercialization of the Alden turbine. As part of this effort, the conference provided a venue to disseminate information on the status of the Alden turbine technology as well as the status of other advanced turbines and research on environmentally-friendly hydropower turbines. The conference was also a product of a federal Memorandum of Understanding among DOE, USBR, and USACE to share technical information on hydropower. The conference was held in Washington, DC on May 19 and 20, 2011 and welcomed over 100 attendees. The Conference Organizing Committee included the federal agencies with a vested interest in hydropower in the U.S. The Committee collaboratively assembled this conference, including topics from each facet of the environmentally-friendly conventional hydropower research community. The conference was successful in illustrating the readiness of environmentally-enhanced hydropower technologies. Furthermore, the topics presented illustrated the need for additional deployment and field testing of these technologies in an effort to promote the growth of environmentally sustainable hydropower in the U.S. and around the world.
ABSTRACT Environmentally enhanced hydroelectric turbines have been developed to reduce injury and mortality of downstream‐migrating fishes and to improve downstream water quality. Significant progress has been made in the past decade in the development of such turbines and in the methods to evaluate their biological and power generating performance. Full‐scale demonstrations have verified the performance of Voith Hydro's minimum gap runner turbine, which maintains high survival rates for fish while producing more power than conventional designs. Despite a promising pilot study and subsequent design enhancements, similar full‐scale demonstrations of the fish‐friendly Alden turbine have yet to be conducted. Furthermore, the tools with which to predict and evaluate the performance of new turbine designs are available and are continually being improved. This article provides a status update of advances in this field over the past decade.
Ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) is a marine renewable energy technology with the potential to contribute significantly to the baseload power needs of tropical island communities and remote U.S. military installations. As with other renewable energy technologies, however, there are potential challenges to its commercialization: technological, financial, social, and environmental. Given the large volumes of seawater required to drive the electricity-producing cycle, there is potential for the intakes to negatively impact the marine resources of the source waterbody through the impingement and entrainment of marine organisms. The goal of this project was to identify feasible warm water intake designs for a land-based OTEC facility proposed for development in Port Allen, Kauai and to characterize the populations of ichthyoplankton near the proposed warm water intake location that could be at risk of entrainment. The specific objectives of this project were to: • Complete a site-specific assessment of available and feasible warm water intake technologies to determine the best intake designs for minimizing impacts to aquatic organisms at the proposed land-based OTEC site in Port Allen, Kauai. • Complete a field sampling program to collect biological data to characterize the baseline populations of ichthyoplankton near the sites being considered for the warm water intake at the proposed land-based OTEC site in Port Allen, Kauai. Various intake design options are presented with the focus on providing adequate environmental protection to the local ichthyoplankton population while providing an economically viable intake option to the OTEC developer. Further definition by NOAA and other environmental regulators is required to further refine the designs presented to meet all US regulations for future OTEC development.
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