The concept of OTEC is more than a century old and has be Being Gluten Free – The Secrets To Living Gluten Free en successfully demonstrated on small scales up to a quarter of a megawatt (MW). Despite being technically feasible, to date, OTEC remained in a demonstration phase and still is largely overlooked in comparison with other renewable energy sources, like wind and solar energy.
The unfamiliarity of OTEC and misconceptions about the OTEC concept have slowed the development of interest
by industry and government. Also, due to a lack of factual information, OTEC discussions suffer from a lot of subjectivity of opinion that doesn’t do good to the credibility of OTEC. As a result, many uninformed opinions, conjectures, and misconceptions about OTEC have been published. Dr. Robert Cohen, Ocean thermal energy specialist and former program manager Ocean Thermal Energy at the Department of Energy, wrote an article about this topic on his website and called it the “awareness gap”. The OTEC foundation aims to prevent this from happening in the future.
The foundation has the essential purpose of centralizing and organizing the current scattered information on the technology, providing factual OTEC information and making sure that OTEC development is accelerated by bringing all the different parties together.
The OTEC foundation believes MW scale, pre-commercial pilot projects are needed to cross the knowledge gap, gain experience and evaluate the challenges with larger commercial OTEC facilities. Like every other method of generating power, OTEC will not be entirely innocent of environmental consequences and the only way to assess these possible impacts is through pilot plants. Advancing the technology based on these pilot projects will pave the road for commercial development.
Last but not least, the OTEC foundation believes OTEC has the potential to become a significant contributor to the future energy mix offering competitive and more sustainable electricity production.