Euskadi for the marine energies
The use of marine energy is not new, as tide mills were used for centuries. There are still remains on the Cantabrian and English coasts. Tidal energy is one of five sources of marine energy. Take advantage of the rise and fall of the sea level throughout the day by the gravitational attraction of the Moon and the Sun. The other four are: marine currents, thermal gradient, saline gradient and wave energy. The marine currents come from the wind, tides, changes in water density and the rotation of the Earth, which is currently obtained by turbines, as in wind. The thermal gradient uses the temperature variation between surface water and deep water. And saline gradient, salinity change between seas and rivers. Finally, it highlights the energy of the waves, which through various principles tries to capture energy from the movements of the waves. It is, together with the current, the energy with the highest supply capacity at European level.
One of the oldest examples of marine technology currently operating is the La Rance tidal power plant in France. It has a power of 240 MW and is operational since the 60s. Technology is already mature, but it has a great environmental impact and research is evolving into new concepts, especially waves and currents.
Internationally, several pilot projects try to demonstrate the viability of marine technologies. In both the Scottish island of Islay and the island of Pico de Portugal, there are pilot installations of wave energy. Both have been built on rocks and, based on the principle of oscillating water column, take advantage of the energy of the waves. In 2008, the Scottish Pelamis Wave Power was the first to sell 3 units of the Pelamis device to the Portuguese government. However, currently the equipment is not in operation. One of the most important facilities is the European Marine Energy Centre test area. EMEC is a pioneering infrastructure on the Scottish islands of Orkney so manufacturers can test prototypes at scale and connect to the network from their equipment.
In Spain, some regional governments have expressed interest in taking advantage of the energy of the waves and are carrying out experimentation projects such as the Iberdrola project in Cantabria and the buoy of the American company OPT, or the Plocan project in the Canary Islands. Within the PSE-MAR project, funded by the Ministry of Industry, 3 Spanish companies have advanced in the development of their technologies: Hidroflot, Pipo Systems and Oceantec
Taking into account the many small projects underway, the current reality of wave energy can be deduced: technological divergence. There are many patented concepts, but none have manifested trade leadership. This is due to the difficulty of validation of these technologies due to the lack of testing infrastructure for installation and testing of equipment.
Basque Country
The Basque Country, being located in the Gulf of Bizkaia, has a northwest deep sea for almost the whole year and a medium-high energy potential of the waves. The Basque Energy Agency (EVE), aware of this opportunity, has been betting on this resource for years by implementing different projects and initiatives. The first is in Gipuzkoa: Wave power installation located inside the new shelter dock of the port of Mutriku. Its technology is similar to that used in pilot plants in Scotland and Portugal: a camera above sea level where there is a turbine at the lower opening. When the water enters, it moves the air from the top of the chamber, thus putting the turbine into operation. The Mutriku, however, will be the first plant in the world to use more than one turbine, 16 specifically, with a total power of about 300 kW.
Another project is the bimep (Biscay Marina Energy Platform), a marine infrastructure with an expected investment of 20 million euros that will be used for experimentation and demonstration of energy technologies of the waves. Unlike the Scottish EMEC, it is designed to perform and test prototype tests on a real scale, with an installed power of 20 MW. The objective of this project is not only to solve the problem of the validation of technologies, but to turn the Basque Country into an international benchmark in this area and create a new industrial and technological sector around this energy.
At the height of Armintza, 1 km from the coast, the bimep will be located in the town of Lemoiz. It will occupy a marine area of a few square kilometers, in an area between 50 and 90 meters deep. The installation consists of marking buoys that delimit the surface surface, oceanographic buoy that measures the meteorological and oceanographic variations to characterize in detail the marine climate of the area, which was installed in March 2009 and since then emits data (www.eve.es/bimep), and sensors that will not be part of the installation and that will use it. In the seabed, connectors (submarine plugs) and submarine cables will be installed that will allow the prototypes to be connected to the electrical grid through a substation to be built on the ground.
Bimep is born with the aim of having manufacturers of wave energy capture devices connect their equipment at real scale to conduct dynamic behavior tests of equipment and energy production. Before reaching the bimep, equipment must pass other phases through small-scale prototype testing under controlled conditions and design optimization.
The installation works of Bimep are planned for the summer of 2011. In November 2009 the Property Engineering competition was awarded to the Basque engineering company Sener and the competition for the supply of cable installation was published. Substation and beacon will soon be published.
NOTE: Thanks to José Luis Villate, head of the Marine Energy Unit of Tecnalia, for his collaboration in the elaboration of this article.
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