Powered by water: Generating electricity from ocean currents

TAIPEI, Taiwan (3 July 2007) — The government is now discussing the possibility of large-scale ocean current power generation, utilizing the strong Kuroshio current off the east coast of Taiwan to generate up to 1.68 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, officials at the Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD) said yesterday.

The project task force, led by Chen Fa-lin, director of the Energy and Environment Research Laboratory under the Industrial Technology Research Institute, is working on fine-tuning the guidelines, which will be presented to CEPD senior officials next month or in September.



After the project gets the green-light, the first step would involve setting up a five-megawatt marine turbine off the nation’s east coast on a trial basis, with the goal of testing both related technologies and power-generating efficiency, council officials said, adding that it hoped the project could proceed to the next stage in three years.

“Current power generation is not a new idea,” officials said.

CDNN