Water Power Peer Review

1. Water Power Peer Review Kevin A. Haas Georgia Institute of Technology khaas@gatech.edu 11/3/2011 Assessment of Energy Production Potential from Tidal Streams in the United States

2. Purpose, Objectives, & Integration Challenges and knowledge gaps addressed: • Provide a full spatial-temporal assessment of tidal currents for the U.S. coastline • A national database of tidal stream energy potential that is publicly available • Interactive Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools for users to assess the scale and the nature of tidal stream power Relation to program’s mission and objectives: • Promote development of tidal current energy technology and accelerate the market

3. Technical Approach Methodology: • Tidal currents are numerically modeled with the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) • Calibrated with the available measurements from NOAA • Independent validation by ORNL • Create a national database of tidal constituents and descriptive statistics • Build GIS servers to disseminate the data • Provide GIS tools • Compute the total theoretical power

4. Technical Approach Key issues: • Spatial-temporal distribution Numerical modeling for better spatial coverage Extract tidal constituents for predicting tidal stream velocities

5. Technical Approach Key issues: • Data accessibility Provide an easy to access, user friendly interface for industry • Facilitate resource investigation Provide basic tools for industry to facilitate preliminary assessment of the tidal stream power resource • Identify resources at a location and generate plots on the fly • Download data for further analysis • Filter for depth, tidal current speed and tidal stream power density • Total available power What is the total available power on a national scale?

6. Plan, Schedule, & Budget Schedule • Initiation date: 15 September 2008 • Completion date: 31 March 2011 Budget: $469,500 Expended: $469,492.85

7. Accomplishments and Results Accomplishments: Project completed. Available at http://www.tidalstreampower.gatech.edu/

8. Accomplishments and Results

9. Accomplishments and Results

10. Accomplishments and Results

11. Accomplishments and Results Goals accomplished: • Provide a full spatial-temporal assessment of tidal currents for the U.S. coastline • A national database of tidal stream energy potential that is publicly available • Interactive Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools for users to assess the scale and the nature of tidal stream power • Promote development of tidal current energy technology

12. Challenges to Date Challenges faced: • Resolving the 3-D structure of the flow (i.e. vertical profile) for a project at national scale • Correct assessment of the total available power • Dissemination of data during peak demand Approaches to resolve challenges: • Modeling with Barotropic assumption • Garrett and Cummins (2005) formula used to estimate the total available power • Additional server and separating the services to meet the peak demand

13. Next Steps Suggestions for future research: • Project is a preliminary assessment of the resources at a national level • More detailed modeling for regions of higher energy, possibly including 3-D structure (i.e. depth variation) • Need for measurement data preferably with durations long enough to derive tidal constituents accurately at energetic locations • Develop more accurate methods for calculating the total power for regions with high energy • Additional geographical information can be integrated to the database