FAU researchers flew to London last month to meet with scientists from two Scottish universities. Their long-term goal is to solve the energy crisis in the United States and England – with seawater.
“There are a lot of similarities in our energy situations,” ocean engineering professor Rick Driscoll says, comparing Florida to the United Kingdom. “We both depend on fuel, hydrocarbons … and have populations near the coastlines.”
Driscoll is the technical director of FAU’s Center for Ocean Energy Technology (COET), which specializes in finding ways to use power from the ocean in place of fossil fuels. He and the center’s executive director, Susan Skemp, took the trip overseas to enter a partnership with the University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University, as well as the New and Renewable Energy Centre. All of these organizations aim to find alternative fuel sources that are practical and affordable.
One area that the organizations are working on is how to use the ocean as a renewable energy source. Renewable energy is a force that is found naturally on Earth, like ocean currents or sunlight, and will never run out. The hydropower concept is a new area of research at FAU, at least compared to the Scottish universities.
“They’ve been working on [ocean energy] seven or eight years now,” Driscoll says. “[The COET has] only been around a year and a half.”
The research that Driscoll and Skemp are working on involves converting the current of the Gulf Stream into energy. The Gulf Stream begins a couple miles off the coast of South Florida, and the current flows north toward Norway. The team plans to place turbines – structures that look like windmills – at the beginning of the stream and attach them to the ocean floor. As the turbines spin, they will produce energy that can then be distributed across the state.
The schools in the United Kingdom have other plans for the ocean. Together, the University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University are studying the potential for wave and tidal power off the coast of Great Britain. Like in Florida, the Gulf Stream flows just a few miles off the coast, creating similar ocean movement.
“We could potentially combine the research [done at FAU and in Great Britain],” Skemp says.
Even if the organizations do not combine research, the work they are doing is similar enough that they can learn from the each other’s mistakes. According to the memorandums of understanding that officials from each institution signed, the research teams will share information about their discoveries with each other and with the public. Some of the researchers in Great Britain already made one notable mistake, although it had little to do with ocean energy itself.
“The general feeling [before the FAU researchers arrived] was that the U.S. wasn’t doing anything about the energy crisis,” says Driscoll. “[But] by the end, they saw that the U.S. was doing a lot.”
