Is This The World’s Best Renewable Energy Video?
This is a promotional video from Minesto about their Deep Green technology.
Is it a serious proposition or is it just kite-flying?
After reading their web site in detail, I think they are serious.
Here’s why!
The Company Is A Well-Backed Spin-Out from Swedish Aerospace Company SAAB
These two paragraphs are from the About Us page.
Minesto is a marine energy technology developer, founded in 2007 as a spin-off from Swedish aerospace manufacturer Saab. Since then, Minesto has successfully developed its unique Deep Green technology.
The company has operations in Sweden, Wales, Northern Ireland and Taiwan, with headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden. Main owners are BGA Invest and Midroc New Technology. The Minesto share is listed on the Nasdaq First North Growth Market in Stockholm.
A company rarely succeeds without appropriate and sufficient financial backing.
One Of Their Target Markets Is Powering Remote Islands
This page from World Atlas is entitled Which Countries Have The Most Islands?
These are the top five countries.
- Sweden – 267,570
- Norway – 239,057
- Finland – 178,947
- Canada – 52,455
- United States – 18,617
Note.
- That’s a lot of islands.
- The United Kingdom is 26th with a thousand islands.
- Scandinavia has 685574 islands or 686993 if you include Denmark.
Sweden has a thousand inhabited islands, so that means that in Scandinavia alone, there are about 2,500 inhabited islands. How many need a reliable decarbonised power supply?
In the UK, we are developing Remote Island Wind to serve similar locations, which I wrote about in The Concept Of Remote Island Wind.
The UK and Minesto are both looking at the supply of power to remote islands.
One of Minesto’s projects is in the Faroe Islands and it is described in this page on the Minesto web site, which has a title of Faroe Islands – Tidal Energy To Reach 100% Renewable By 2030.
These are the first two paragraphs.
In the Faroe Islands, Minesto is part of one of the world’s most ambitious energy transition schemes.
Collaborating with the electric utility company SEV, Minesto is working to pave the way for tidal energy to become a core part of the Faroese energy mix, allowing them to reach 100% renewable energy by 2030.
Onshore wind and tidal could be an ideal combination, if they worked together.
At the bottom of the Faroe Islands page, the web site talks about The Deep Green Island Mode Project, where this is said.
In June 2019, Minesto was awarded a €2.5 million grant from the European Commission’s SME Instrument programme. The awarded funding will support the installation of Minesto’s technology in the Faroe Islands together with the utility company SEV. The aim of the project, called Deep Green Island Mode (DGIM), is to install Minesto’s first two commercially viable microgrid units in a production and customer environment.
Successful demonstration of DGIM will act as a first step to developing commercial ties with utilities across Europe, both for smaller-scale microgrid systems and as a catalyst for the market up take of larger utility-scale Deep Green systems.
This is also said about the number of installations in Europe.
15 million Europeans live on Europe’s 2,400 inhabited islands, at an average of approximately 1,500 households per island. As recognised by the European Commission, island energy is expensive, polluting, inefficient and dependent on external supply, with significant negative impacts on emissions, the competitiveness of businesses, and the economy.
It appears to me, that Minesto have researched their market well.
Minesto Can Provide Baseload Power
Another of Minesto’s projects is in Taiwan and it is described in this page on the Minesto web site, which has a title of Taiwan – Replacing Nuclear With Renewable Baseload.
These are the first two paragraphs.
In Taiwan, Minesto is carrying out site development with the purpose to establish the first tidal energy arrays with Minesto’s technology in Asia – and to demonstrate renewable baseload generation from the continuously-flowing Kuroshio current.
The conditions for extracting marine energy in Taiwan are very good due to access to both tidal streams and continuous ocean currents. Taiwan aims to produces 20% of electricity from renewable sources by 2025 and has decided to scrap its nuclear power capacity within the same timeframe. Today, 97.5 percent of the country’s total energy use comes from imported fossil fuels.
Taiwan has a well-developed industrial infrastructure and a number of stakeholders in the private and public sectors are active in marine energy.
Decarbonising Taiwan and removing nuclear is a tough ask!
Conclusion
Minesto may be kite-flying in an unusual way, but they appear to be a very serious Swedish company.
‘A Gift For Putin’: Czech E-shop Sells Tanks And Grenades To Support Ukrainian Army
The title of this post, is the same as that of this story on expats_cz.
This is the introductory paragraph.
The Czech Republic has been among the most active countries in supporting the Ukrainian military with donations and sales of weapons and ammunition, including shipments of Soviet-era tanks, multiple rocket launchers, howitzers, infantry fighting vehicles, and anti-aircraft weapons.
I hope the gift, will calm Vlad the Mad.
The Anonymous Widower 