A revolutionary concept to store clean energy is envisioned for Florida

The Green Power Island, a revolutionary concept to store clean energy presented in the Copenhagen Climate Conference is envisioned for Florida and other parts of the world.  It uses atoll-like artificial islands as pumped energy storage. The "instant and low tech answer to the growing problem of green energy overflow" according to its creators.

Pumped storage or hydro storage is a method to store energy by pumping a mass of water to a reservoir at a higher elevation.  In hydroelectricity, this stored mass of water is released to drive turbines generating electric energy when needed.  Hydro storage has been in use for centuries.  At present, there are more than 20 plants worldwide with pumped hydro storage installations of more than 1 GW.  Pumped hydro storage is one of the most common methods to store power energy from any source using fresh water.

Some of the few plants in the world generating electricity from pumped brine or seawater are in France, Japan and in Norway.  The Rance plant opened in 1966 in France uses tidal power to produce a maximum of 240MW and average power of 68MW.  The plant in Norway is a prototype inaugurated less than a month ago that uses Osmotic Power technology to create enough potential energy to drive a water turbine that generates a tiny 1kW of electricity (our article on Osmotic Power includes more information about this technology).  In operation since 1999, the Yambaru plant in Okinawa, Kunigami Village, Japan, is the world’s first seawater pumped storage power station.  It uses energy generated by a combination of coal thermal power plants to drive seawater 140 meters high to an artificial pond on a hilltop.  This plant was designed to generate 30MW of electricity.

View Larger Map  View of the Yambaru plant in Japan (Image:  Google Maps)

Pumped hydro-storage is the essence of the Green Power Island (GPI) concept presented in the Copenhagen Climate Change conference.  Gottlieb Paludan Architects and Risø-DTU with support from Danish and international energy advisors created the concept.  The vision of this consortium is to build Green Power Islands to solve the problem of energy storage needed when wind or solar energy plants are not generating power, and at the same time, a needed reservoir to store energy overflow.

          Storing and releasing pumped seawater in a Green Power Island (Image: Gottlieb Paludan)

GPIs, according to this concept, are mainly pumped seawater storage facilities.  The size of the island as well as its storage capacity could be designed according to the demand of energy.  The designs presented by Gottlieb Paludan include Green Power Islands for Florida, Denmark, India, Bahrain and China. 

  Conceptual model of the Manama Green Power Island in Bahrain (Image:  Gottlieb Paludan)

Green Power Island Denmark was created by the consortium to include several GPIs, among them: Nordhavn (total area 1.5 km2, storage capacity 440 MW-h), Copenhagen (total area 4.9 km2, storage capacity 2,300 MW-h), Kattegat (total area 14 km2, storage capacity 6,700 MW-h) and Kriegers Flak (total area 44 km2, storage capacity 34,000 MW-h).

                         Conceptual model of the Copenhagen Green Power Island (Image:  Gottlieb Paludan)

At this moment, building a GPI for energy storage is just an idea, a concept that will require technical, environmental and financial feasibility studies, among others, before becoming a reality.

More information is available at http://www.greenpowerisland.dk/