Nov 24
2009

After wind, sun, currents and tides, a company is preparing to make clean electricity by harnessing another natural phenomenon, the energy-unleashing encounter of freshwater and seawater.

Taking a step further in the planet’s hunt for clean power, Norway is to unveil on Tuesday the world’s first prototype of an osmotic power plant on the banks of the Oslo fjord.

The project is small-scale but could prove the great potential of osmotic energy.

“It is a form of renewable energy which, unlike solar or wind power, produces a predictable and stable amount of energy regardless of the weather,” explained Stein Erik Skilhagen, in charge of the project at state-owned Statkraft, which specialises in renewable energies.

Osmotic energy is based on the principle that nature is constantly seeking balance, and plays on the different concentration levels of liquids.

When freshwater and seawater meet on either side of a membrane — a thin layer that retains salt but lets water pass — freshwater is drawn towards the seawater side. The flow puts pressure on the seawater side, and that pressure can be used to drive a turbine, producing electricity.

The phenomenon of osmosis is widespread in nature, permitting plants to drink through their leaves, and is used by industry to desalinate seawater. But the Norwegian experiment, a prototype that will produce just enough electricity to power a coffee-maker, will be the first time osmosis is used to make power.

“What’s important for now is to test and validate the technology, not to produce a lot” of electricity, Skilhagen said of the two to four kilowatts (KW) the plant will likely produce at first.

And Statkraft’s aspirations for osmotic power go far beyond the prototype, set up in a former chlorine factory in Hurum, about 60 kilometers (37 miles) south of Oslo.

The company hopes to have a commercial-size plant up and running by 2015, producing about 25 megawatts (MW) of electricity, or enough for 10,000 homes.

And it says osmotic power has a global potential of 1,700 terawatt hour (TWh) annually, equivalent to half the current power production in Europe or China’s total energy consumption for 2002.

Statkraft itself admits there is still a long way to go, starting with finding how to make more energy-efficient membranes.

The ones tested at the Hurum plant will have an efficiency level of less than 1 watt per square metre. The company says it plans to install membranes that can deliver 2-3 watts per square meter after some time, but an efficiency level of 5 watts per square meter is needed to make osmotic power profitable.

“It is definitely a point to work on,” said Gerald Pourcelly of the European Membrane Institute, adding that time could bring the efficiency level of membranes to 5 or 6 watts per square meter.

Nevertheless, “everything that contributes to the development of renewable energy sources is positive,” the scientist stressed, “considering the progression of carbon dioxide emissions and dwindling fossil fuel reserves.”

Original story

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Nov 5
2009

Author John Burnside finds inspiration for his supernatural stories in the eerie landscapes and deserted fishing towns of Norway’s Andøya island

All my life, I have been a celebrant of Halloween. For me, it is the most important day of the year, the turning point in the old pagan calendar. It is a time for reflection, for taking a moment to confer with my personal ghosts – as far away as I can take myself from glow-in-the-dark plastic skeletons.

It’s also a time for stories, for retelling the old and beginning the new. As an author, the stories I tell are about our deepest superstitions (the devil peering out from a dark mirror at midnight, say, or the dark energies hidden in the land around us), so I take myself away to haunted places – places such as subarctic Norway. It first captivated me in the mid 90s, and has drawn me back ever since to linger in the darkness and the quiet, and to find the spectral figures – real and imagined – who move through my stories.

Figures like the huldra, a troll-like creature from local folklore who appears in the form of an unbearably beautiful young woman and lures men to their doom, or the haunted old storyteller in my current novel-in-progress, a man named Kyrre Ericson, who sees what nobody else does.

Nowhere is more inspiring to me than this northern corner of Scandinavia, and nowhere is better to escape the fake blood and synthetic terrors of commercial Halloween than the ghostly fishing towns and eerie white beaches of Andøya, an island in Norway’s Vesterålen region, at the western and most exposed edge of a long, scattered archipelago extending from the Lofotens in the south to the city-island of Tromsø further north.

Eerie, spooky, haunted … these are not the usual words that spring to mind when describing a coastal resort; but then, the wide, ash-white reach of shoreline at the village of Bleik is no ordinary beach. At around 3km, it is Norway’s longest and, situated as it is between a dark, ice-cold sea and damp, shadowy marshland, it really is the stuff, not only of ghost stories, but of the pagan awe that inspired old-time fishermen to tell tales that still scare me.

Bleik – Norwegian for “white” or “pale” – is a haunted spot even on summer nights, when midnattsol turns the white sand into a scene from a Munch painting, but it is at its eerie best when the winter darkness falls. It is a perfect place to go walking in the moonlight, under the bright subarctic stars, listening for the voices of dead sailors drifting along the coast from the old whaling stations at the town of Andenes, a couple of miles up the coast, or the sea-trows (trolls) and wights (wraiths) who lie hidden between the wind-bleached fish huts, further up the shore.

Out here, in the in-between world, where the cat from the village comes to hunt shore birds among the reeds, the mind quickly learns to doubt the things it usually takes for granted. Half an hour on Bleikstranda after dark is enough to transform the most rational creature into a superstitious wreck.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2009/oct/31/norway-subarctic-beach-tromso-andenes

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