Ocean Thermal Energy Corp. – Great Mission, Huge Potential
I’m learning a great deal about social media by helping my fellow investors in Ocean Thermal Energy Corporation to construct their cool new website EmpowerTheOcean.com, and to build traffic/search engine optimization for it. It’s been instructive coming up to speed on the cutting-edge thinking about the use of Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of these platforms.
Among my jobs is coming up with ideas for compelling content, one of which is the uniqueness of the investor base: over 300 people, mostly from Central Pennsylvania, have bought stock in this early-stage high growth company. When you think about it, that’s a story unto itself.
First of all, it’s a huge number of people for a company that is still privately held. And Central Pennsylvania? No offense to anyone, but the home of the Amish isn’t exactly where I would have expected to find a hotbed of cutting-edge renewable energy technology, and an enormous investor pool to get it off the ground.
Again, any accredited investors are invited to join us. It’s a fantastic group of people, on a mission to bring clean energy to regions of the world that either have no electricity at all, or that generate their power from diesel shipped in. It’s expensive, it’s unreliable, and it’s dirty.
But in addition to the mission are the terrific financial prospects. These OTEC plants are huge, and operate at considerable profit. If you’re interested, please let me know.
I wonder how a energy source based in certain locations, in the world’s oceans is going to bring electric power to villages which are not coastal and in fact centrally located in jungle and rainforest regions without clear-cutting a half mile wide swath and erecting high towers and high voltage transmission lines deep into the interior of underdeveloped countries? or are they really planning to serve coastal cities and hope to make enough profits to spread across Africa and South-east Asia and many of the larger island nations. Consider that it took the USA 30 years to spread electricity across the nation to homes, towns, and businesses; and it wasn’t complete until the mid 1940s. It isn’t just generating energy, a new scheme to distribute it efficiently and economically and here in the USA we have generating facilities scattered throughout the country and seldon transport power over 50 miles in large volume, there are still losses in transport even at high voltage and low current. That is why aluminum smelters are always located adjacent next to power plants, especially Hydro generating plants. as their the most economical to operate.
Ops, used the wrong “their” should have been “they’re”…
Craig, why won`t this program let me edit my comment after it is reformatted to show as you and others would see it. WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) has been around since 1977. It was a feature in “Wordstar” and the “Lotus 123” word processor in CPM. (And DOS then Windows grew from CPM.
And that “Enter your content here” is always in the way when I proofread before I click on “Post Comment”
Perhaps the directions should say “compose your comment in your word processor then copy to this space” (That is not humor…it is a complaint!)
Dennis: I don’t know how to respond to your numerous mentions about the technical failings of the site. I’m not a tech guy. All I know is that it’s a garden-variety implementation of WordPress, by far the most popular platform for blogs; in fact, WP has 3.5 times more implementations than it’s #2 competitor (Joomla). http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all. More than a billion people use it happily every day. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm. Of our few hundred daily readers, you are literally the only one who seems to have a problem.
Dear Mr Miles,
You have raised a very good question though it is quite common either among non-energy experts or even among electrical engineers who usually think that “energy only in the form of electricity.” As we have learned since school days, energy can neither be destroyed nor created, but it transforms itself or be converted from one form to another: for instance, the light from the Sun be converted to heat, electricity, mechanical (either potential or kinetic) or chemical (as stored in batteries or in the form of the like of fuel such as hydrogen and ammonia) … back to heat and the outer space. Since the distribution of renewable energy potential from a number of sources including biomass, wind, hydro, wave, tidal, current(s), ocean thermal energy, and even geothermal energy, is not that uniform throughout the world nor concentrated in every place where there is demand for power, it would be logical to think of not only electricity but also other forms of energy carriers including hydrogen, heat-engine, chilled water, methanol and other forms of alcohols, and compressed biogas. To meet any localised demand for electricity, the fuel-forms of energy carriers can be transported by appropriate mode of transport and logistics from the place of generation or production to any place of demand where fuel-conversion-to electricity, such as Hydrogen Fuel Cells, need be installed.
In Malaysia, for instance, we are not that fortunate, but perhaps a blessing, the nearest 700 meter isobath or deeper, is about 60 km from the main island coastline(s) of the States of Sabah and Sarawak except of course in very few places off the remote islands in the South China Sea within the Exclusive Economic Zone of Malaysia. Thus, our proposal would be to convert the surplus electrical power, from ocean thermal energy conversion plants, to hydrogen fuel. According to a study, by the end of this 21st Century, hydrogen fuel, as an energy carrier, would make up almost 50 % of all forms of energy carriers.
In short, hydrogen is, not from any source, but renewables including ocean thermal energy for a sustainable future.
There are many millions of people living in coastal regions with lots of them in proximity to deep tropical or sub-tropical waters, and many of these coastal areas are already connected by grid connections to adjacent inland areas. I do not think that anyone is suggesting that OTEC be used to the exclusion of other forms of generation so the issues of new transmission lines are unlikely to be too major.
Regards what to do with surplus power, manufacture of ammonia as a fuel, or ammonium nitrate fertiliser may be worth considering through hydrogen + N2 to ammonia then onwards to ammonium nitrate. This gives “energy dense” transportable end products more easily handled than hydrogen.
Yes, I am interested.
Great. Let’s talk. Please see my email.
Nice idea!
Am quite sure that in principle it does work as well. The only problem I have with it is that using delta t of 25 degrees, large volumes of pumped of water through a pipe, efficiencies of conversion processes, etc. etc. and compare that with the net output of such a system using the max theoretically possible thermodynamic efficiency I end up with the result that within 50 years the whole thing does not even produce the amount of energy that was needed to build it in the first place. If that was the case, then that would defeat the objective of going down that road, wouldn’t it?
Can anyone please prove me wrong on this? Any kind of solid data would be appreciated!
Cheers, Roland
Thanks for supporting us at ETO Craig. OTEC plants have huge potential in helping island communities in gaining energy independence and reducing oil consumption. Not forgetting the huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions that will be saved from entering our atmosphere – OTEC is an all round winner.