Global T.E.A.M. Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion
Oceans cover almost 70% of our earths surface. With this great expanse comes great opportunity for harnessing of new sources of energy. OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion) provides a means to harness this latent, and insofar untapped, energy.Executive Summary
Oceans cover almost 70% of our earths surface. With this great expanse comes great opportunity for harnessing of new sources of energy. OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion) provides a means to harness this latent, and insofar untapped, energy. This energy presents an inexpensive, efficient, and clean alternative to the environmentally unsound practices that currently supply the majority of the modern world's energy. With the help of OTEC if used proficiently and in a big scale it could be a solution to some of the current energy problems of today. OTEC has the potential to produce billions of watts of electric power for the developing and industrial world.
In this business plan, we will be presenting and advocating the research, design, and implementation of Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) power plants. OTEC Power plants work on the principles of the Rankine Cycle to harness the temperature differential between the warm surface ocean water and the cold subsurface ocean water. This temperature difference facilitates the vaporization of a fluid, which drives a turbine, generating electricity. The Rankine cycle, at its base, is what facilitates the power generation for most of the world. Either via coal, natural gas, or nuclear power plants the Rankine cycle is driving the turbines that drive the world economy.
The team working on this project is comprised of a set of core motivated individuals with varied and complementary experience and skill sets. Specifically in the area of team leadership, mathematical aptitude, engineering experience, business experience, and global communications. These skillets combine to form a highly motivated and highly professional team whose sole goal is the creation of an environmentally friendly, economically feasible, and efficient OTEC centered multinational cooperation.
OTEC offers a clean, renewable source of power for regions with warm surface ocean water and access to very deep subsurface water. OTEC harnesses the worlds largest solar collectors, the oceans, for its basic operations. It is this abundance of heat based energy and zero emission nature of an OTEC plant which help combat the growing problem of CO2 and other greenhouse emissions from other, fossil fuel burning, power plants. OTEC plants can expand globally along equatorial waters to the exploding economies of India and China in addition to Japan, Indonesia, Hawaii, Pacific islands, and Caribbean islands. The potential expansion for OTEC based technology is enormous. OTEC plants not only provide a clean source of energy but as a side result they also serve to provide increased mariculture in their particular area of implementation, vast amounts of potable water, cold soil agriculture, and industrial air conditioning. OTEC plants are attractive not only due to their main purpose but also their secondary benefits.
OTEC plants have benefited and capitalize upon the idea of a global economy, or a "flat" economy. The equatorial and sometimes ocean based architecture of an OTEC plant make several globalizing features of the plant such as open sourcing, off shoring, revolutionizing the supply chain, and capitalism of the digital revolution all necessities of their environment. The cooperate structure of an OTEC cooperation would be dominated by an all pervasive connection to the rest of the global cooperation due to the current global network. The flow of ideas, data, documents, and images would be seamless and fully integrated. By using this digital revolution all of a sudden offshoring, outsourcing, insourcing and supply chain revolution all become easily obtainable. No longer must consultants or managers fly oversees to inspect a plant or branch division, they can now view it via streaming web feed, or view the data coming from any OTEC plant anywhere in the world instantly. The supply chain is instantly apparent to all with a connection to the digital network as well, thus allowing efficient and simple supply chain management. Similarly, with this access to mountains of information, Informing becomes a natural byproduct of the system.
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