Home Publisher's Point of View Dent Island Lodge Turns to Tidal Currents to Generate Needed Electricity

Dent Island Lodge Turns to Tidal Currents to Generate Needed Electricity

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The luxurious Dent Island Lodge is located on Stuart Island in British Columbia, northwest of Vancouver. The resort sits adjacent to a network of waterways that connect to the Pacific Ocean. The property’s location is remote yet it is easily accessible by water taxi and seaplane. While its location is its strong point from a get away from it all, touristic standpoint, the resort is reliant on diesel fuel to power the generators that produce its electricity—a rather costly approach to power generation and not very sustainable.

In the first quarter next year, Dent Island Lodge will test a highly unique floating power plant that will provide all of the electricity it needs. The plant will sit within a specially built barge and be connected to the Lodge by submersible cable. Vancouver, B.C.-based Water Wall Turbine Inc. is providing the system that extracts potential and kinetic energy from large, fast moving water currents for conversion into electric energy. The Switch, Vantaa, Finland, will supply the 500 kW full-power converter for the plant. Brevini Gear Systems, which has a Yorktown, Ind. location in the United States, will provide the integrated mechanical driveline system.

First Installation of Its Type

Marek Sredzki, CEO, Water Wall Turbine Inc., told me the plant will be the first commercial installation of its type and will be integrated with a Tesla battery energy storage system. The batteries are needed because tidal currents are not continuous. “There are strong tidal currents that come every six hours,” Sredzki said, adding that tidal currents never stop, making the hydro plant very precise in its production. “One will know how much power it will produce forever,” he said.

The Stuart Island location does not lend itself to solar, given the fair amount of gray skies in that part of the Northwest. A wind turbine is also not practical, as the resort needs a more consistent power source. From a cost standpoint, Sredzki said the floating plant will be comparable to a wind turbine installation. Maintenance on the plant will be minimal.

Sredzki told me the plant is one of two in the works for resorts in that part of Canada. The second installation is expected to be twice the size of the Dent Island Lodge plant. The floating plant at Dent Island Lodge will join a very small number of lodging establishments currently powered directly by a hydroelectric system. Green Lodging News currently lists the others on its website.

If successful, this new type of hydro plant could easily provide a portion, if not all, of the electricity needed by many coastal properties.

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