Turbines’ effects on water renewal within a marine tidal stream energy site

Nicolas Guillou, Jérôme Thiébot and Georges Chapalain

Energy, 2019, vol. 189, issue C

Abstract: As tidal stream energy sites contribute to a significant part of water transport in coastal shelf seas, turbines’ implementation may lead to system-wide changes of the hydrodynamic circulation with potential effects on marine water quality. These aspects were investigated in north-western coastal waters of Brittany (France, western Europe) by simulating the decay of a tracer concentration within a control domain surrounding the tidal stream energy site of the Fromveur Strait. Simplified simulations were adopted to analyse the sensitivity of tracer distribution to stream energy extraction. While this marine area showed important renewal capacity with a 50% loss of tracer concentration in less than three days, residual values were still present after two months. This result exhibited that the concentration decay could not be calibrated by simple exponential functions. The renewal of marine waters appeared furthermore dependent on tracer release time during a tidal cycle. A full energy-extraction scenario was finally simulated suggesting weak effects of turbines on the renewal capacity with changes in residence times below 5%. The spatio-temporal Eulerian evolution of the concentration revealed, however, local trapping areas in close correlation with the Lagrangian residual circulation that vanished after two months.

Keywords: Marine water quality; Tidal stream energy extraction; Fromveur strait; Ushant-Molène archipelago; Brittany; Telemac (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544219318080
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:189:y:2019:i:c:s0360544219318080

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2019.116113

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().