Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) March 3, 2008 — The world’s energy appetite is growing fast, and energy production capacity is being rapidly devoured. A fundamental shift in global demand has begun accompanied by a slow supply response, given the long lead-time required to rebuild surplus fossil fuel capacity. While the major renewables, solar and wind power, are growing at double digits they still make up less than 1% of the country’s total energy output. The world must find clean sources of power that can be developed on a fast track. Bourne Energy has developed just such a renewable energy system which is described on their new website: www.bourneenergy.com.

After extensive research, Bourne Energy has targeted hydropower as the most likely clean energy source to develop on a global scale. Hydropower is as cheap as coal, which is a major source of global warming emissions. Today, while coal is producing 40% of the world’s electricity; hydropower is quietly producing 20% of the world’s electricity with zero emissions. And many energy analysts now believe coal resources are far less than originally projected while only 4% of the world’s estimated potential hydropower resources have been harnessed.

Through the centuries hydropower has been dominated by the dam and reservoir configuration. But these large dam and reservoir projects, many built fifty or more years ago, are land intensive, environmentally unfriendly and are no longer cost-competitive to replicate today. Bourne’s solution is its RiverStar (Patent Pending) Kinetic Energy System, a “Power Company in a Box.” Place the self-contained energy module in river currents and it produces electricity from the harnessing of moving water in the river rather than the potential energy of water stored behind large dams. This technology has come about from the development of new materials, micro-power generation systems, hydrodynamic breakthroughs, improved structures and new power transmission, communication and control technologies.

Bourne’s RiverStar System is designed to tap the energy in thousands of miles of rivers that stretch across the globe. Over a million cubic meters per second discharge of water flow down the world’s major rivers every hour, every day, every year. Many stretches of these rivers are virtually unpopulated and undeveloped. The energy locked up in this enormous volume of moving fluid can be harnessed again and again.

Bourne’s novel approach does not require construction on the river bottom, which is both expensive and time-consuming. Construction, especially in industrialized countries, may also expose toxic materials, long hidden in the river sediments. Bourne’s proprietary low RPM turbines are specially designed to be safe for aquaculture. And the RiverStar power modules can access and tap the difficult areas where much of the world’s unharnessed hydropower is located. These kinetic energy modules are designed to be mass-produced in order to rapidly scale up this technology worldwide.

Bourne has also adapted its Kinetic Energy Systems to harness the world’s potential ocean power and tidal power resources in the form of its OceanStar (Patent Pending) and TidalStar (Patent Pending) systems. Bourne plans to have small demonstration power arrays operating in Asia, US and Europe within the next 12 months.

Contact:
C.Catlin
310-456-8112
contact @ bourneenergy.com
www.bourneenergy.com

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On December 18, 2007, Pacific Gas and Electric Company announced its support for plans to build America’s first commercial wave power plant off the coast of Northern California. The plant will consist of eight buoys, 2 1/2 miles offshore, each buoy generating electricity as it rises and falls with the waves. The plant is scheduled to begin operating in 2012, generating a maximum of 2 megawatts of electricity. Each megawatt can power about 750 homes.

Plans to install three 750 kW Pelamis devices at the Aguçadora Wave Park in Portugal in 2006 have been delayed and no installation had taken place by August 2007. Other plans for wave farms include a 3MW array of four 750 kW Pelamis devices in the Orkneys, off northern Scotland, and the 20MW Wave hub development off the north coast of Cornwall, England.

The north and south temperate zones have the best sites for capturing wave power. The prevailing westerlies in these zones blow strongest in winter.