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Hydropower Experiments
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Hydropower Background Information
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There are many forms of water energy:
- Hydroelectric energy is a term usually reserved for large-scale hydroelectric dams. Examples are the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State and the Akosombo Dam in Ghana.
- Micro hydro systems are hydroelectric power installations that typically produce up to 100 kW of power. They are often used in water rich areas as a Remote Area Power Supply (RAPS). There are many of these installations around the world, including several delivering around 50 kW in the Solomon Islands.
- Damless hydro systems derive kinetic energy from rivers and oceans without using a dam.
- Wave power uses the energy in waves. The waves will usually make large pontoons go up and down in the water, leaving an area with reduced wave height in the "shadow". Wave power has now reached commercialization.
- Tidal power captures energy from the tides in a vertical direction. Tides come in, raise water levels in a basin, and tides roll out. Around low tide, the water in the basin is discharged through a turbine.
- Ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) uses the temperature difference between the warmer surface of the ocean and the colder lower recesses. To this end, it employs a cyclic heat engine. OTEC has not been field-tested on a large scale.
- Vortex power, which creates vortices which can then be tapped for energy
- Deep lake water cooling, although not technically an energy generation method, can save a lot of energy in summer. It uses submerged pipes as a heat sink for climate control systems. Lake-bottom water is a year-round local constant of about 4°C.
- Blue energy is the reverse of desalination. This form of energy is in research.
Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.)
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