More funds for Hawaii's Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion plant

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Kona is a good place for this type of technology; waters are calm most of the year. The sides of all the islands facing northwest would be fine for wave energy extraction since the majority of waves from storms comes from the northwest. The eastern sides usually have strong currents and underwater turbines could be used on those sides.

A small OTEC barge was floated off the coast of Hawaii in the 80's, maybe as far back as the late 1970's. I'd heard it had been concluded the amount of energy to be extracted from ocean temperature differences was too low to be worth the bother.

Once again, an article about a "promising" new energy source with no info about the most important factor--cost efficiency. You need some real reporters who can do more than republish a press release.

Ocean floor temp is around 4C or 277K. Say surface temp is 27C (300k). That means that the maximum thermodynamic efficiency of the cycle is 1-277/300=7.6%. OK, your fuel is free but you're going to have to circulate a LOT of water to get meaningful amounts of power and I suspect your pumping and conversion losses will make this impractical or require truly massive installations.

Actually, at Kona you don't need something so elaborate. There's a live volcano nearby, so use a steam turbine based on geothermal power. They've been doing it for a long time in Iceland.

Plasma Junkie nailed the physics. There is no way around this. How about getting your reporters to ask follow up questions of the folks that issue you information if your reporters are not able to do some due diligence ahead of the first publication here.

tsvieps: the costs are given ... $4.4M $8.1M $1M = $13.5M

It'll produce: 10 MW x 24 x 365 = 87,600 MW hr/yr

At $0.10/kWhr or $100/MWhr, annual revenues are $8,760,000 or $8.76M/yr

That means a payback of less than 2 years ... pretty darn good!

Apparently Hawaii rates are much higher than $0.10/kWhr for even faster payback!!!

tsvleps, the $4.4M is "to develop critical system components and designs for the plant." They are still at the design stage. This is on top of $10.1M already spent. LM is not known for low-cost gadgetry. It will be another $50M before anything ever produces a single kW and likely $250M before it reaches its design output of 10MW.

If you look at image one from the photo gallery, you will see we have no business investing tax-payer money in OTEC - the resource is in the wrong place.