Lockheed Martin to build China’s first OTEC plant

First commercial scale OTEC Plant to be built off the coast of southern China.

Lockheed Martin is working with Reignwood Group to develop an Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) pilot power plant. Ocean thermal uses the ocean’s natural thermal gradient to generate power.

Where there is warm surface water and cold deep water, the temperature difference can be leveraged to drive a steam cycle that turns a turbine and produces power. Warm surface seawater passes through a heat exchanger, vaporizing a low boiling point working fluid to drive a turbine generator, producing electricity.

Lockheed Martin Ocean thermal is a binary system where the heat difference between two points is used for an energy source. With the huge reservoir of ocean heat, the process can serve as a baseload power generation system that produces a significant amount of renewable, non-polluting power, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In April, a memorandum of agreement between the two companies was signed in Beijing for a 10 megawatt offshore plant, to be designed by Lockheed Martin. The project will be the largest OTEC project developed to date, supplying 100% of the power needed for a green resort to be built by Reignwood Group.

In addition, the agreement could lay the foundation for the development of several additional OTEC power plants ranging in size from 10 to 100 megawatts for a potential multi-billion dollar value.

A commercial-scale OTEC plant will have the capability to power a small city. The energy can also be used for the cultivation of other crucial resources such as fresh-water production by flash evaporating the warm seawater and condensing the subsequent water vapor using cold seawater and producing energy carriers such as hydrogen and ammonia, which can be shipped to areas not close to OTEC resources.