Otec

OTEC - Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion
By Maria Bechtel and Erik Netz Table of contents:
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Summary Introduction What is OTEC? Land-based powerplant Floating powerplant Land-based or floating plant? Closed-cycle, open-cycle and hybrid-cycle Where can OTEC be used? How effective is an OTEC powerplant? What can you use OTEC for besides produce electricity? How much does an OTEC powerplant cost? Advantages & Disadvantages Environment Experiments ABB Conclusion References

Summary OTEC, Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion is an energy technology that converts solar radiation to electric power. OTEC systems use the ocean’s natural thermal gradient. The OTEC process consist of pumping cold ocean water to the surface and using the temperature difference between this and the warm surface water to run a thermal engine to generate electricity. Producing electricity is not the only thing that OTEC can do. You can, if you want, reduce the amount of electric power and produce fresh water instead. This can be very significant on for example islands where fresh water is limited. OTEC uses water from the bottom of the sea, which is nutritious, one result of this is that a lot of fish and other seafood will be collected in the outlet flow. This means that OTEC not only produce electricity, it produces water and food too.

Introduction The oceans cover a little more then 70 percent of the earth surface. This makes it the world’s largest solar energy collector and energy storage system. On an average day, 60 million square kilometres of tropical seas absorb an amount of solar radiation equal in heat content to about 250 billion barrels of oil. If less than onetenth of one percent of this stored solar energy could be converted into electric power, it would supply more than 20 times the total amount of electricity consumed in the United State (263 million inhabitants) on one day. The history of Mankind, have depended upon its ability to conquer the