en.Wedoany.com Reported - UK clean energy company Global OTEC announced on Wednesday that it has completed the offshore installation of a floating prototype platform in Spain's Canary Islands. This is the first system specifically designed to generate continuous electricity offshore using ocean temperature differentials. Located at the Canary Islands Oceanic Platform (PLOCAN) test site, engineers have deployed and connected the vertical seawater intake riser, a critical component for extracting cold water from the deep sea and the most complex part of the system.
The project, named PLOTEC, was funded with 3.5 million euros by the European Union's "Horizon Europe" program. After years of simulations and tank tests, researchers will now evaluate its performance in a real-world environment, including its behavior under open-ocean conditions and its environmental impact. Ocean thermal energy conversion utilizes the temperature difference between warm surface water and cold deep seawater to drive turbines, generating continuous electricity. By placing the plant directly over deep ocean waters, the pipe length can be reduced by approximately 80%, making large-scale systems more practical.
Global OTEC noted that many tropical islands still rely on imported diesel and heavy fuel oil for power generation, which is costly and unstable, whereas ocean thermal energy conversion can provide round-the-clock, stable baseload electricity. The company estimates that over 25 gigawatts of fossil fuel capacity in tropical island regions could be replaced by such systems. CEO Dan Grech stated: "This is the moment OTEC moves from a controlled environment into the real world. OTEC can be scaled through modularization, becoming a replicable source of baseload power." In the next phase, the company plans to deploy the first OTEC power module in Hawaii to validate the system's reliability and scalability at sea.
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