Ocean Thermal Energy Corporation (OTE Corporation) from Lancaster, Pennsylvania (US) has won a contract to design its first two commercial plants that generate electricity from temperature differences in ocean water.
Back in the 1990s,OTE Corporation’s Chief Science Officer, Dr. Stephen Oney, participated at length in the research and development phase of proving a promising renewable energy technology, Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC). Dr. Oney’s successful involvement in the Hawaiian pilot OTEC plant launched him into a major role as a premier ocean engineer in the ensuing commercialisation of OTEC. Now, more than 10 years later, Oney and his team are to develop their first commercial system on an island of the Bahamas in the Atlantic Ocean north of Cuba.
According to a report in a Lancaster newspaper, OTE Corporation has signed a memorandum of understanding with Bahamas Electricity Corp., which provides electricity to 85 percent of the country’s electricity consumers, to design and construct two of OTE Corporation’s unique plants. The plants would be owned and operated by OTE Corporation and would cost about $100 million to develop. They would have a nameplate capacity of between five and 10 megawatts.
“We’ve been working on getting a contract. We always knew it would happen. It was a question of when, not if,” Jeremy P. Feakins, OTE chairman and chief executive officer, told the Lancaster’s Tom Mekeel.
The agreement represents a milestone in this novel technology, which comprises “a base-load renewable energy production process particularly suited for tropical zones”. The technology, which OTE Corporation describes as “proven”, having demonstrated the technical viability of a 210 kW pilot plant at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii, uses the ocean’s temperature differential between the warm surface water and the cold deep water to generate both electricity and potable water.
