Every Sunday, “Back in the Day” looks at an article that ran on this date in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The items are verbatim, so don’t blame us today for yesteryear’s bad grammar.
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The nation’s first floating test platform for extracting energy from warm ocean waters will be put in operation off Ke-ahole Point, Kona, by 1980, the Department of Energy announced today.
The department said that Global Marine Development Co., Newport Beach, Calif., had been selected to design, build and operate the $42.7 million project.
Global Marine, with subcontractor TRW Inc. of Redondo Beach, Calif., was selected from four proposals, three of which had planned to site their projects in Hawaii.
The announcement follows by a week the state’s announcement of release of $1 million in state funds for basic development of Ke-ahole as a major center for energy, aquaculture and related scientific research.
In the meantime, negotiations are continuing between the state, Lockheed Aircraft Corp., and Dillingham Corp. for a small, 50-kilowatt facilties at Ke-ahole using the ocean thermal energy conversion technique.
Designated OTEC-1, an acronym standing for ocean thermal energy conversion No. 1, the test platform will be used to assess the potential of generating electricity from the temperature differences of the oceans.
In the concept, warm surface water would be pumped through heat exchangers to evaporate a working fluid, such as ammonia or Freon. The vapors would then spin a turbine to generate electricity.
After driving the turbine, the working fluid would be cooled by colder water drawn up from thousands of feet below until it becomes a liquid and begins the cycle again.
Actual testing and evaluation of the heat exchangers and other components will be done by the Energy Technology Engineering Center, a division of Rockwell International.
Global Marine will convert a government-owned T-2 tanker, the Chepachet, which is not in the Navy’s mothball fleet, into the test platform. …
The OTEC-1 project is for a pilot plant, which, if successful, would be a forerunner of plants 10 times as large and called prototypes.
The prototypes would be forerunners of large floating power plants that might generate commercial quantities of electricity by the late 1990s.
