Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2008GA180B

Tidal Streams: A Renewable Energy Source for Georgia

Institute: Georgia
Year Established: 2008 Start Date: 2008-03-01 End Date: 2009-02-28
Total Federal Funds: $18,264 Total Non-Federal Funds: $39,965

Principal Investigators: Kevin Haas, Hermann Fritz

Project Summary: Water resources are at the heart of the two largest challenges facing the world in the 21st century: drinking water and energy supplies. Traditional fossil sources of energy are not renewable and also are sources of pollution such as carbon dioxide. Therefore, alternative forms of clean renewable energy need to be exploited in order to meet the growing energy demands and environmental constraints. The proposed project is to identify and evaluate potential locations of tidal streams to be used as energy which will enhance the ability of Georgia to position itself at the forefront of the utilization of water resource energy technologies in the United States. Identification of locations of ocean energy will be based on a variety of factors including historical records, concentration of tidal flows, avoidance of shipping lanes, fisheries, recreational areas and environmentally sensitive areas. To assist with the identification of the regions with concentrated tidal flows, results from a state of the art numerical tidal model simulating the tides along the Georgia coast will be utilized. An advanced GIS tool will be developed for assisting in the analysis of tidal energy potential. In addition, a new methodology for incorporating the effect of energy extraction into a numerical tidal model will be developed in order to quantify the actual impact of tidal energy extraction on tidal flows.