Japan Is Soon To Harness The Ultimate Power Source To Produce Energy

As the world spins faster into the future, the pursuit of creating clean energy is perhaps our greatest quest. To make our energy…

As the world spins faster into the future, the pursuit of creating clean energy is perhaps our greatest quest. To make our energy completely renewable and do away with carbon emissions for the good, we need to innovate and harness nature in the most suitable way to provide for the growing energy needs of the world’s ever-increasing population.

The ocean is perhaps our greatest asset when it comes to renewables and our quest to produce energy without leaving a huge carbon footprint.

In an older article, I explained how we must ‘rethink the role of the ocean in the fight for climate change.’

However, recently this month, Japan has begun what could be the next revolution in clean energy creation by, yes, harnessing the ocean.

Japan’s interesting natural landscape makes for picturesque and scenic views. The country has exquisite mountain ranges, valleys, natural geothermal geysers and springs, volcanoes, and oceans that are near-shore deep sea trenches.

However, although Japan’s landscape may be easy on the eye, and make for touristy views, the underlying issues are that their landscape has made setting up solar farms and wind turbines very challenging. That’s why when Japan decided to shift their focus to renewables, they went with nuclear first.

It’s also the reason why Japanese cities are so notoriously crowded and constricted.

These natural restrictions have made Japan explore how to harness the ocean currents surrounding their landmass as the ideal carbon neutral source of energy.

As Medium writer, Will Lockett writes,

“Take the Kuroshio current off the East Coast of Japan. It is the ocean’s largest current and can travel at a rate of 75 miles per day and carry the equivalent water volume as 6,000 large rivers.”

“So, in theory, ocean current power could be the perfect eco-energy source. Unlike solar and wind it doesn’t require expensive, giant grid-level mega-batteries to keep output consistent, which reduces its carbon footprint and the need for environmentally dubious mining.

It also doesn’t cause habitat loss like solar, or impede ships like wind farms, as ocean current power is 100 m beneath the surface. What’s more, it is estimated that the Kuroshio current could provide up to 205 GW of power, which is comparable to Japan’s current total electricity production.”

Japan’s Kairyu Project

Japanese company IHI Corp, have recently completed testing on the world’s first deep sea turbine which is capable of harnessing ocean currents to produce energy.

As explained on ExtremeTech,

A deep sea turbine off the coast of eastern Japan has proven capable of producing almost as much energy as a coal plant.

Kairyu, a massive turbine prototype produced by Japanese machinery manufacturer IHI Corp, sits at least 100 feet underwater. Its anchor line allows it to flex its position to most effectively harness energy from the Kuroshio Current — one of the strongest ocean currents in the world.

At first glance, Kairyu looks like an underwater jet. Its middle consists of a 66-foot fuselage, each side of which has a similarly-sized turbine cylinder attached. Both turbine cylinders contain power generators, control mechanisms, and measuring systems which correspond with their respective 36-foot turbine blades. The machine sends all generated energy up a series of cables for use on the country’s power grid.

As Medium writer, Lockett explains,

“As you can see in the pictured above Kairyu is a ‘floating’ current turbine. This means that it is anchored to the sea floor and the wing-like shape of its body can control the depth at which it ‘floats’.

This makes it more akin to a subsea kite. The advantage here is that it can be maneuvered into the fastest flow of the current for optimal power (generally around 100m depth) and can easily come to the surface for maintenance.

There is a turbine on each wingtip that collectively generate a total of 100 kW of power in the 3.4 mph flow of the Kuroshio current.”

Lockett further explains,

“IHI Corp Has tested and validated this concept and is now looking to move up to a full-scale near-production prototype. But the actual turbines are far larger than the development ones.”

“Their turbines will be 40 m across and a single unit (two turbines on a ‘floating’ platform) will produce 2 MW making them 2,000 times more powerful than the Kairyu prototype. Once built, IHI wants to build a farm with 100 of these to produce a whopping 200 MW”

While as Input Mag suggests,

Bloomberg reports that the Kuroshio Current could potentially generate as much as 200 gigawatts, or 60 percent of Japan’s present generating capacity, according to estimates by Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization.

The Future Of Energy

While this new technology is still in testing currently, it will take further testing and innovative engineering to assess its feasibility and see it deployed by countries worldwide, starting with Japan.

In theory, harnessing ocean currents can provide constant energy as opposed to irregular winds or sunshine.

However, starting with Japan, and as this technology is perfected, we could see deep sea turbines like the Kairyu, change the future of how we produce energy and usher in perhaps the most innovative way of producing power based on the greatest resource we have on the planet — the ocean.

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