Osmotic Power Goes Live in Norway, a New Green Energy
It’s simple, cutting edge and extremely preliminary. It’s called osmotic power and as of yesterday, Norway’s state power company Statkraft is operating the world’s first osmotic power plant.
The prototype plant, located on the Oslo fjord, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) south of the Norwegian capital, produces just enough green energy to run a coffee machine (2-4 kilowatts).
How does osmotic power work? The end-goal, like sun or wind generation, is to power a turbine that in turn generates electricity. In the osmotic process that turbine is powered via the pressure created when fresh water flows into seawater.
Photo credit: Statkraft
Specifically, in the Statkraft prototype plant, fresh water and salt water are fed into two chambers that are separated by a membrane. The fresh water is then naturally drawn toward the seawater side, which creates enough pressure to generate a power turbine — see this video for more.
Statkraft says that in the future osmotic energy could meet about half of the European Union’s total electricity demand.
But going commercial will have its own sets of challenges, considering that a 25-megawatt osmotic power plant would be as large as a football stadium and require some 5 million square meters of membrane.
Like a lot of initiatives in clean energy, the idea and prototypes are exciting. Actually scaling that technology and going commercial is a quite another ball game. Statkraft, undeterred, says it can roll out a commercial power plant by 2015.
