"Sited on the banks of the Oslo fjord in southern Norway," and using something called the "membrane rig," New Scientist reports, "it generates electricity using the natural process that keeps plants standing upright and the cells of our own bodies swollen, rigid and hydrated."
[Images: Screen grabs from a video produced by Statkraft, makers of the technology under discussion here].The company in charge of the station, Statkraft, estimates—incredibly—that "the total global potential of osmotic power to be around 1700 terawatt-hours per year—about 10 per cent of the world's current electricity consumption."
After all, river estuaries are batteries waiting to happen, we read, albeit "a novel kind of battery," one that turns liquid mixtures into machines.
Ode Magazine steps in here, adding that the process, called reverse electrodialysis, operates by "deriv[ing] clean power from the mixing of saltwater and fresh water." BLDGBLOG has already explored the possibility that the sedimentary discharge of large rivers might be put to use as large-scale, deltaic 3D printers, but putting rivers to work as a weird new form of electrical equipment sounds at least as exciting.
On the other hand, the total power now being produced by this particular plant in Norway is only "enough to continuously boil two or three kettles." So this might be good news for a family or two of avid tea-drinkers trapped up there in the cold winter nights of Scandinavia, but it's still a process very much challenged by scalability.
Post Title → I Sail the River Electric
