Ready For Lunar-Powered Renewables?

Source: Gene Wolf · T&D WORLD · | July 30, 2021

Tidal energy technology has potential, and it will definitely be interesting watching its development.

Source: T&D World

I finished last month’s “Charging Ahead” assignment, and it’s time to relax. I like to do that by catching up with some of the webinars that I didn’t have time to watch the first time around. One of the nice things about webinars is their streaming on-demand feature. It lets me fit them into my schedule rather than missing them because of timing issues.

The current crop of virtual offerings covers a lot of different topics. They include LiDAR, artificial intelligence, substation modernization, and grid modernization to list a few, but there is one that really got my attention. The webinar sponsored by Siemens was  titled “Visions of 2040: What’s in Store for the Energy Industry,” and it had some interesting discussion points.

A couple of months ago, I had written about the "macrogrid,” but the presenters took that a couple of steps further with a discussion on global and transnational grid interconnectivity. There were several other topics that caught my interest like making virtual power plants more stable with power electronics, deep interconnectivity, and platform trading. I had some serious investigating to do.  

I headed off to one of my favorite tech sites for more research on future articles, but I got sidetracked by a strange margin-photo, which often happens. I thought it was an airplane making a water landing, but according to the article, I was way off target. The photo was of Orbital Marine Power’s O2 floating tidal power platform being towed to Scotland’s Orkney Islands. That photo had taken me into a corner of the grid I hadn’t visited in a long time:, lunar-powered renewables.

Hydrokinetic Energy

I find the whole concept of tidal turbine technology fascinating. Tidal technology has been used for thousands of years to grind grains, but today’s technology includes a variety of turbines making electricity. Tidal technologies take advantage of the moon’s pull on the Earth.