Video: Tidal energy kite powers the Faroe Islands
S. Himmelstein | March 18, 2024A utility-scale tidal power plant is now delivering electricity to the national grid in the Faroe Islands. The tidal energy kite, rated at 1.2 MW, was successfully commissioned by tidal energy technology developer Minesto.
The Dragon 12 tidal energy kite. Source: Minesto
The Dragon 12 tidal energy generator is a 12 m wide and 28 ton subsea kite, anchored with a tether to the seabed. The power plant consists of a wing, which carries a turbine directly coupled to a generator in a nacelle. The wing uses the hydrodynamic lift force created by the underwater current to move the kite. With an onboard control system, the kite is autonomously steered in a predetermined figure-of-eight trajectory, pulling the turbine through the water at a water flow several times higher than the actual stream speed.
The turbine shaft turns the generator, which outputs electricity to the grid via a power cable in the tether and a seabed umbilical to the shore. Additional tidal arrays with a total capacity of 120 MW are planned for this autonomous territory of Denmark, generating an estimated 350 GWh per year and supplying 40% of the archipelago’s growing electricity consumption.
I would like to understand how they deal with the twice a day tide changes, especially at the mooring electrical connection.
How are they dealing with no generation between tides, four times a day?
I wonder if that principle of increasing the speed of the water past the turbine could be used with wind in some way.
The Kite seems to me to be using a larger cross section of the water than the kite surface to get greater output from a smaller plane surface. It is like a propeller in a way, except it is not a round cross section, but a figure 8 cross section of flow