Blue Energy Canada Inc. (Vancouver, BC) announced that it has raised $20.0 million to commercialize its ocean energy turbine, and has received a memorandum of understanding from an unnamed international finance house to support its high-density hydro-turbine. The vertical-axis turbine, based on the 1927 patent for a vertical-axis windmill by French inventor Georges Darrieus, is similar to wave energy technology, but offers a higher energy density, and the turbine units can be linked across a body of water to double as a transportation corridor.
Blue Energy has been seeking a company to install a 500kW commercial demonstration project. A proposal to install a 4km system, costing $2.8 billion and generating 2,200MW at tidal peak, on the Dalupiri islands in the Philippines was delayed due to political problems in that country.
Seawater is 832 times as dense as air and Blue Energy believes that an array of its turbines can generate 180 times more electricity than wind turbines in a comparable area. The global potential for ocean energy is 450GW, representing a market of $550.0 billion with a capital cost of $1,200 per kilowatt for large facilities and $3,000 for smaller ones.
