The US government is continuing to provide funding for the research and development of innovative energy technologies in its quest to improve energy security.
The Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded defence and technology firm Lockheed Martin a contract to demonstrate technologies that could be used in Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) systems, which use the thermal gradients in the oceans to generate energy.
Under the co-operative agreement contract – worth up to $1.2 million – Lockheed Martin will develop and demonstrate cold water piping fabrication methods using modern fibreglass technology and low-cost composites. The work will help to overcome one of the key technical barriers to the commercialization of OTEC systems, says Lockheed Martin.
“OTEC holds the promise of providing clean, base-load electricity to energy markets that today rely almost exclusively on fossil fuels” said Denise Saiki, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin’s Undersea Systems business unit. “Our independent research and development work to date has shown OTEC to be technically feasible. The next step is to demonstrate it on a commercial scale and this DOE contract will help accelerate our progress towards that goal.”
OTEC systems must move large volumes of water in order to generate commercial levels of power as temperature differences in the ocean are relatively small, says Lockheed Martin. Large-diameter cold water piping must be installed to depths of hundreds of meters and the fabrication and installation of the pipes is a major technical challenge.
OTEC systems also use a large portion of the energy they generate to pump the seawater.
Lockheed Martin says it is already exploring a range of potential applications for OTEC technology, including electric power and freshwater generation. In the 1970s it teamed up with Bechtel to study the practicality of generating electricity from the solar energy naturally stored in the ocean’s thermal gradient.
It has also funded a four-month demonstration of OTEC technology in Hawaii, called Mini-OTEC. The Mini-OTEC plant remains the only floating, net power producing OTEC plant ever built.
