Wednesday, October 31, 2007

The Councils

GLG Scholar Consult with Me: John Aldersey-Williams

For a while now, I've been a Council Member. The Councils are organisations of experts organised by the Gerson Lehrman Group, which offer expert consultations on a wide range of matters to interested parties (often investment banks or other financial institutions).

Gerson Lehrman has just produced the above graphic, which I've now incorporated into my blogspot profile too. If you'd be interested to have a specific discussion on the issues raised in this blog, or on other renewables topics, please click on it to make contact via Gerson Lehrman.

Pretty soon....


you'll be able to walk across the Bay of Fundy, leaping from tidal device to tidal device, without touching the water.

The map (thanks Google) shows where the Bay of Fundy lies, on the eastern seaboard of North America.

Now Marine Current Turbines has announced an agreement with the Maritime Tidal Energy Consortium to develop a project in the Bay of Fundy. It joins Open Hydro, and Ocean Renewable Power in planning projects in this area, which benefits from the highest tidal ranges in the world. There are also some suggestions out there on the internet that a tidal barrage might be an option.

The question in my mind is whether there are areas with attractive stream speeds too, but this entry on the Bay of Fundy blog clearly recognises that sites are available.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

Mackie's - Sustainable ice cream



Mackie's Ice Cream - a proud Scottish company - now has a little logo on each and every pot of its ice cream showing that it is made with renewably generated electricity from these turbines.

Lots more details here...
Nice one Mackies.

Saturday, October 06, 2007

Neptune re-awakened


Interesting news that Scottish and Southern Energy has combined its tidal device - the Neptune - with Aquamarine's Oyster wave technology and some venture capital money.

Check out the press release here

Monday, October 01, 2007

EMEC Tidal open for business!


I spent Friday on the Orcadian island of Eday, watching Alex Salmond open the EMEC Tidal facility. If you look at this carefully, you can see the OpenHydro turbine in the background, just next to Neil Kermode, EMEC's MD. (Alex managed to find some schoolchildren to pose with later on in Eday Comunity School, but I didn't get a photo of that.)

We took a ferry from Kirkwall to the island, looping around the OpenHydro turbine which has been in the Falls of Warness since earlier this year. The picture clearly shows the bow wave around the device in an equinoctal spring tide - about 7 knots.