Inventor Lance McMullan has a beautiful house on Douglas Island. But he spends almost all of his time in the garage.
McMullan isn’t the only one who’s excited. Tidal power could be an alternative to burning fossil fuels like diesel and natural gas, which is driving human-caused climate change. McMullan is starting smaller. His company, Sitkana, makes small tidal generators that are perfect for individual fishing boats and liveaboards. He hopes they can revolutionize ocean power the way rooftop panels revolutionized solar power.
“It’s kind of hard to go anywhere in Alaska without tripping over a good tidal energy site,” said Brian Polagye, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Washington and the Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest Laboratory. McMullan loads the disassembled generator into Brian Delay’s boat for a test in October 2023. , but large utility projects take a lot of time and money to build. And as communities adopt things like electric vehicles and electric heat pumps in an effort to cut down on carbon dioxide emissions, demand for renewable energy keeps growing. His effort to make ocean energy accessible began while he was working as a deckhand on a troller in Sitka.
It took him years to develop Sitkana’s current prototype, the Chinook 3.0. The small tidal turbine has a few key differences compared to other tidal generation designs. While many tidal projects are anchored to the ocean floor, the Chinook 3.0 is free-floating and portable. It weighs less than a hundred pounds.
Tidal currents spin the rotor, which turns a generator inside the body of the turbine to create 1.6 kilowatts of electricity. That’s enough to meet one person’s daily needs, assuming the generator stays in the water for most of the day.