Dorian Roffe-Hammond sent me this item about Tulane University's RiverSphere, for which Tulane just received a $3M Federal grant.
From the press release:
The U.S. Economic Development Administration has awarded Tulane University a $3 million grant to help build RiverSphere, a Center of Excellence at Tulane that will promote the development, testing, demonstration and commercialization of renewable energy technology, using one of New Orleans’ greatest natural resources – the Mississippi River.
RiverSphere will be a research center, an education facility, an exhibition space and a business incubator focused on water sustainability and renewable energy. The facility, located at the Robin Street Wharf, will include floating barges on which private companies can test prototypes of power turbines capable of generating electricity using river currents. The project’s business incubator will be a catalyst for the creation and support of “green” energy jobs and will help make New Orleans an exporter of sustainable energy technologies and intellectual capital throughout the country.
Here is more:
“RiverSphere will focus initially on “in-stream” hydrokinetic technologies that harness the power of the Mississippi River to generate carbon-free electricity,” said Douglas Meffert, RiverSphere executive director and deputy director for policy at the Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research. “RiverSphere will be a place to explore the most cost-effective and environmentally safe energy solutions for New Orleans, Southeast Louisiana and similar geographies around the world.”
The RiverSphere hydrokinetic turbine testing facility will be the nation’s first “vendor-neutral” in-stream demonstration site, meaning that it will be open for use by multiple companies. The data gathered in testing the ecological, navigational, hydrological and other potential impacts of these technologies will play a key role in determining how they can be deployed in the most environmentally sensitive way while generating as much electricity as possible. The RiverSphere incubator will host a variety of technologies in order to help more companies obtain the proof they need for commercialization and deployment worldwide.
At Oregon State, we're big on wave energy - a different type of hydrokinetic energy.
"A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory." -- Steven Wright
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