Water Power Peer Review Assessment of Energy Production

Water Power Peer Review Assessment of Energy Production Potential from Tidal Streams in the United States 1 | Program Name or Ancillary Text Kevin A. Haas Georgia Institute of Technology khaas@gatech. edu 11/3/2011 eere. energy. gov

Purpose, Objectives, & Integration Challenges and knowledge gaps addressed: – Provide a full spatial-temporal assessment of tidal currents for the U. S. coastline – A national database of tidal stream energy potential that is publicly available – Interactive Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools for users to assess the scale and the nature of tidal stream power Relation to program’s mission and objectives: – Promote development of tidal current energy technology and accelerate the market 2 | Wind and Water Power Program eere. energy. gov

Technical Approach Methodology: – Tidal currents are numerically modeled with the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) – Calibrated with the available measurements from NOAA – Independent validation by ORNL – Create a national database of tidal constituents and descriptive statistics – Build GIS servers to disseminate the data – Provide GIS tools – Compute the total theoretical power 3 | Wind and Water Power Program eere. energy. gov

Technical Approach Key issues: – Spatial-temporal distribution Numerical modeling for better spatial coverage Extract tidal constituents for predicting tidal stream velocities 4 | Wind and Water Power Program eere. energy. gov

Technical Approach Key issues: – Data accessibility Provide an easy to access, user friendly interface for industry – Facilitate resource investigation Provide basic tools for industry to facilitate preliminary assessment of the tidal stream power resource – Identify resources at a location and generate plots on the fly – Download data for further analysis – Filter for depth, tidal current speed and tidal stream power density – Total available power What is the total available power on a national scale? 5 | Wind and Water Power Program eere. energy. gov

Plan, Schedule, & Budget Schedule • Initiation date: 15 September 2008 • Completion date: 31 March 2011 Budget: $469, 500 Expended: $469, 492. 85 Budget History FY 2009 DOE FY 2010 Cost-share $107, 343 6 | Wind and Water Power Program DOE $217, 777 FY 2011 Cost-share DOE Cost-share $144, 104 eere. energy. gov

Accomplishments and Results Accomplishments: Project completed. Available at http: //www. tidalstreampower. gatech. edu/ 7 | Wind and Water Power Program eere. energy. gov

Accomplishments and Results 8 | Wind and Water Power Program eere. energy. gov

Accomplishments and Results 9 | Wind and Water Power Program eere. energy. gov

Accomplishments and Results 10 | Wind and Water Power Program eere. energy. gov

Accomplishments and Results Goals accomplished: – Provide a full spatial-temporal assessment of tidal currents for the U. S. coastline – A national database of tidal stream energy potential that is publicly available – Interactive Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools for users to assess the scale and the nature of tidal stream power – Promote development of tidal current energy technology 11 | Wind and Water Power Program eere. energy. gov

Challenges to Date Challenges faced: 1. Resolving the 3 -D structure of the flow (i. e. vertical profile) for a project at national scale 2. Correct assessment of the total available power 3. Dissemination of data during peak demand Approaches to resolve challenges: 1. Modeling with Barotropic assumption 2. Garrett and Cummins (2005) formula used to estimate the total available power 3. Additional server and separating the services to meet the peak demand 12 | Wind and Water Power Program eere. energy. gov

Next Steps Suggestions for future research: – Project is a preliminary assessment of the resources at a national level – More detailed modeling for regions of higher energy, possibly including 3 -D structure (i. e. depth variation) – Need for measurement data preferably with durations long enough to derive tidal constituents accurately at energetic locations – Develop more accurate methods for calculating the total power for regions with high energy – Additional geographical information can be integrated to the database 13 | Wind and Water Power Program eere. energy. gov