Floating Energy Plants Will Help Light-Up Africa

re posted from                                     AFRICA AND THE WORLD

Floating Energy Plants Will Help Light-Up Africa

Floating Energy Plants Will Help Light-Up Africa

Turkish floating power plant will supply 150 megawatts of power to Sudan’s national energy grid

22/05/18

By Huseyin Erdogan

ANKARA

Turkey’s floating power plant, the Karadeniz powership Rauf Bey, started electricity production in Sudan, a member of the Istanbul-based Karadeniz Energy Group, Karpowership, announced Tuesday.

The powership, which has 180 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity, will supply 150 MW of power to Sudan’s national energy grid.

The plant is important for the stability of the country’s national grid as it caters for the country’s increased energy demand.

The company announced on April 27 that it signed an electricity production and sales agreement with Sudan’s electricity company, STPGC.

Karpowership is the sole owner, operator and builder of the first powership fleet in the world. Since 2010, 15 powerships have been completed with total installed capacity exceeding 2,800 MW.

An additional 5,000 MW of powerships are either under construction or in the pipeline.

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African nations desperately need energy to develop their economies, build industries, and to expand their agriculture and manufacturing sectors. With hundreds of additional gigawatts of power, the continent can be transformed; hunger and poverty can be eradicated . Energy is an essential category of infrastructure that every nations needs to achieve higher levels of economic growth. Africa should have nuclear energy, and floating nuclear power plants can contribute to supplying power to the continent. I have been advocating this idea for decades, and now its time has come!

New Era of Floating Nuclear Plants Begins

May 22, 2018—With great ceremony, the Russian city of Murmansk welcomed the floating nuclear plant Akademik Lomonosov on May 19. The plant had traveled from St. Petersburg where it was built. It will receive its supply of nuclear fuel in Murmansk, and then proceed to the Arctic circle town of Pevek, where it will begin to supply power to the population of approximately 50,000 people in the area next year.

New Era of Floating Nuclear Plants Begins

Russia’s floating nuclear plant, the Akademik Lomonosov

Constructed by the state nuclear power firm, Rosatom, the 144×30 meter, 21,000-ton barge holds two 35-MW nuclear reactors similar to those used to power Russian icebreaker ships. The barge can produce enough electricity to power a town of 200,000 residents, far more than the 5,000 who live in Pevek, Russia’s northernmost town.

Small, portable nuclear reactors have long been employed by the U.S. Navy, and presumably other militaries as well, but previous attempts to produce them for civilian purposes have met with sabotage. The United States actually did have such a plant in operation in Panama in the late 1960s, but it is being dismantled, and plans for production for use off the Eastern Seaboard of the United States were ditched in the 1970s. This, despite the nuclear Navy’s sterling safety record, and the obvious advantages of such plants for isolated areas suffering from a lack of electric power.

Among the obvious places crying out for such a deployment is Puerto Rico, which has now suffered the second-longest electricity blackout in history. (The longest was in the Philippines in 2013.) At least 20,000 homes in Puerto Rico still lack electricity as a result of Hurricane Maria (which hit last September), and a new hurricane season is about to begin. Indeed, the “repaired” system is so fragile that most of the Island was plunged into darkness about a month ago, as a result of a contractor accident.

U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry actually mooted the possibility of using small modular nuclear reactors to reach remote places in Puerto Rico last fall. But despite a verbal commitment to nuclear energy, the Trump Administration’s embrace of deregulation has so far been unable to halt the whittling away of the mainland nuclear fleet, much less been able to initiate the nuclear renaissance which is needed to move the U.S. economy into the next level of productivity.

The American System of Economics rests firmly on a commitment to constant increases in scientific progress and productivity, of which nuclear fission and fusion are prime examples.

Source: lawrencefreemanafricaandtheworld

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