1 | Program Name or Ancillary Texteere.energy.gov Water Power Peer Review Assessment of Energy Production Potential from Tidal Streams in the United States

1 | Program Name or Ancillary Text eere.energy.gov

Water Power Peer Review

Assessment of Energy Production Potential from Tidal Streams in the United States

Kevin A. Haas

Georgia Institute of [email protected]/3/2011

2 | Wind and Water Power Program 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


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


Technical Approach

Key issues:– Spatial-temporal distributionNumerical modeling for better spatial coverage

Extract tidal constituents for predicting tidal stream velocities


Technical Approach

Key issues:– Data accessibility

Provide an easy to access, user friendly interface for industry

– Facilitate resource investigationProvide 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 powerWhat is the total available power on a national scale?


Plan, Schedule, & Budget

Schedule• Initiation date: 15 September 2008• Completion date: 31 March 2011

Budget: $469,500 Expended: $469,492.85

Budget History

FY2009 FY2010 FY2011

DOE Cost-share DOE Cost-share DOE Cost-share

$107,343 $217,777 $144,104


Accomplishments and Results

Accomplishments:

Project completed. Available at

http://www.tidalstreampower.gatech.edu/









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


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


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

Documents

1 | Program Name or Ancillary Texteere.energy.gov Water Power Peer Review Assessment of Energy Production Potential from Tidal Streams in the United States