Floating Windmills with Umbilical Cords
Norway is putting windmills on floats and setting them out to sea. Norway’s experience with offshore drilling ensures that the windmills won’t go too far; the windmills have long shifting anchors, similar to those used with oil rigs. To transport the collected energy back to shore for storage and onward transportation, engineers have added a reverse umbilical cord of sorts, a cable which carries the nourishing energy back to the motherland.
The Global Concerns group spent an intense afternoon crawling through the nooks and crannies of energy-related technologies. Our speaker was Gina Domanig, Managing Director of Emerald Technologies; Gina is a venture capitalist in the area known as ‘Cleantech’, a term used to describe energy technologies and services which focus on improvements in process efficiency, pollution reduction, or the use of renewable resources such as sun, wind, and waves.
In the world of venture capitalists, the emphasis today, we learned, is on sun, wind and waves. For those who missed the lecture, bio-fuels are out. The challenges and the opportunities are many, but they always come back to collection, transportation, and storage. Collecting solar energy in a dessert seems like a good idea. But the collected energy must be transported to the consumer, i.e. fed into an electricity grid, which can then move and store electricity until the consumer needs it. Many of the world’s deserts are simply too far away from the consumer markets and their grids.
Not so with Portugal; this country enjoys sunny skies and is a part of Europe’s dense integrated electricity grid. And Portugal has a green energy vision. By the end of 2011, Portugal will be equipped with a network of electric-car recharging stations and a fleet of battery-powered vehicles to make use of them. To meet the energy demand, Portugal is in the process of building what will be the largest solar photovoltaic plant on the planet. Looking at the details, we learn about a novel way to counter-balance the consumption peaks that might be caused when too many cars ‘tank up’ at the same time: the cars will not only store energy, they will also sell back energy to Portugal’s power-grid.
After and during a well thought-out talk, Gina fielded many questions, a few of which are repeated here:
Norway is putting windmills on floats and setting them out to sea. Norway’s experience with offshore drilling ensures that the windmills won’t go too far; the windmills have long shifting anchors, similar to those used with oil rigs. To transport the collected energy back to shore for storage and onward transportation, engineers have added a reverse umbilical cord of sorts, a cable which carries the nourishing energy back to the motherland.
The Global Concerns group spent an intense afternoon crawling through the nooks and crannies of energy-related technologies. Our speaker was Gina Domanig, Managing Director of Emerald Technologies; Gina is a venture capitalist in the area known as ‘Cleantech’, a term used to describe energy technologies and services which focus on improvements in process efficiency, pollution reduction, or the use of renewable resources such as sun, wind, and waves.
In the world of venture capitalists, the emphasis today, we learned, is on sun, wind and waves. For those who missed the lecture, bio-fuels are out. The challenges and the opportunities are many, but they always come back to collection, transportation, and storage. Collecting solar energy in a dessert seems like a good idea. But the collected energy must be transported to the consumer, i.e. fed into an electricity grid, which can then move and store electricity until the consumer needs it. Many of the world’s deserts are simply too far away from the consumer markets and their grids.
Not so with Portugal; this country enjoys sunny skies and is a part of Europe’s dense integrated electricity grid. And Portugal has a green energy vision. By the end of 2011, Portugal will be equipped with a network of electric-car recharging stations and a fleet of battery-powered vehicles to make use of them. To meet the energy demand, Portugal is in the process of building what will be the largest solar photovoltaic plant on the planet. Looking at the details, we learn about a novel way to counter-balance the consumption peaks that might be caused when too many cars ‘tank up’ at the same time: the cars will not only store energy, they will also sell back energy to Portugal’s power-grid.
After and during a well thought-out talk, Gina fielded many questions, a few of which are repeated here:
- Could Portugal become a net energy exporter? What impact might that have on nuclear power sellers in other countries?
- Will robots resolve the problems of cleaning solar collectors and repairing offshore windmills?
- Switzerland has little sun, no sea, and its wind will not be easy to capture. Which are the technologies that Switzerland might pursue to take advantage of the rising green tide? Hint: membrane technologies, geo-thermal processes, bio-tech areas such as fermentation.
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