Wednesday, September 14, 2011

What is the green stack number for wave/tidal power in Hong Kong?

Ocean energy is a fairly new source of energy so many of the processes aren't refined as well as they will be someday. With this being said, the ocean's energy can be very valuable if energy-extraction stations are placed in strategic locations. Both waves from the ocean and the changing tide can be used to produce usable energy. Since Hong Kong is surrounded by the Pacific Ocean the potential for renewable energy through the ocean is certainly there. Wave power is measured as energy per unit length instead of per unit area since the waves can only travel on one direction. The unit length we will use is meters. The coastline of Hong Kong is 733 km long [26]. We will assume that the power of the Pacific wave, on average, is 50 kw per meter of coastline. That means that if every meter of the Hong Kong coast was set up to extract energy we could get 36.7 GW of energy! However, this is extremely unrealistic. The shoreline is not covered in these stations, and not even close to it. Wave data collected by the Hong Kong Observatory at Waglan Island in1999, showed that a 10 kW installation will take up about 35m of shoreline [31]. Because the population is so large we can assume that at most, 25 percent of the coastline is covered with these wave machines. That means that if these machines were to be 50% efficient at capturing the energy, Hong Kong could produce about 23 MW of energy. This number comes out to be about 1.3 kWh per day per person. Tidal energy is a little more complicated than wave energy since large wave basins are required. These basins contain a water-wheel that turns when the tide changes, and since the area of the basin determines the amount of water and therefore the amount of energy, tidal energy is expressed in energy per unit area. For an impounded water basin with a constant water level difference of H meters, the potential energy of the water stored in the basin for each tide is 4.91 H2 kJ per m2. This is the theoretical maximum estimation formula for tidal energy resources. With the help of seven tidal energy stations in Hong Kong taking their annual totals of tidal energy we can say that the average energy produced per station is 13.7 kJ per m2 per day [31]. This may sound like a lot at first, but again, the wave basins cannot be built all along the coast. Assuming the another 25% of the coast is covered with these wave basins (taking each wave basin to be 50 m2) then Hong Kong should be able to generate about 700 kWh per day. Since the population Hong Kong is so large this doesn't seem to be a very large part of their renewable resource potential at about 2 kWh per day per person.