Harnessing the power of wave motion
September 4, 2012
Power buoy (credit: Ocean Power Technologies)
The first commercially licensed grid-connected wave-energy device in the nation, designed by Ocean Power Technologies, is in its final weeks of testing before a planned launch in October, The New York Times reports.
Last month, the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center in Oregon — financed by the United States Department of Energy in collaboration with Oregon State University and the University of Washington — deployed one of the first public wave energy testing systems in the nation, called Ocean Sentinel, about two and a half hours from Portland, in Newport.
The onboard computer in each buoy, in communication with an array of small devices called wave riders that float farther out in the ocean, adapts, or “tunes” to each incoming wave, adjusting the way the giant internal shaft rides up and down as the swell passes through. The up-and-down motion of the shaft creates the electricity, which goes to shore through a seabed cable.
(Credit: Wikipedia Commons)
In related news Monday from Bloomberg, AW-Energy Oy, the Finnish developer of systems that generate power from the motion of waves, has raised $9 million from investors including the country’s biggest utility Fortum Oyj (FUM1V) to commercialize its its WaveRoller device, which is affixed to the sea floor and generates power as waves move a panel back and forth.
Waveroller (credit: AW-Energy)
Comments (7)
by Dan Robinson
There’s a lot of enthusiasm about growing technology here. I’m wondering if we’re lookijng sufficiently at the growing problems of growing population, environmental degradation, peak oil, government corruption ect. We need to get away from the mode of “Play now, pay later” to the opposite. Will human consciousness, technology and community survive long enough to reach these utopian goals?
by Renzo Canepari
Bri, this isn’t the first. The Pelamis machine generated power commercially in Portugal three years ago. Something went wrong with the device, and when it was fixed the operator had gone out of business. Other ocean wave devices are at: http://www.pelamiswave.com http://www.awsocean.com, http://www.wavebob.com. http://www.aquamarinepower.com, and http://www.oceanliinx.com
All of these devices should be ready to generate commercially in the next few years.
I wonder of Dr. Kurzweil has a timeline on this stuff, like his timeline of 2018 for photovolltaics to become commericialy viable.
by Bri
There are a lot of wave genrators out there. We have a test one in the east river by Manhatten. They can be viable. I think tossing component into space with a rail gun could make a space based solar systems that would produce huge amounts of power. Like I’ve said before, there’s a lot of real estate up there!
by Bri
Although the energy density of waves is much higher than than wind, the ocean is a harsh place. In my eyes solar is the best bet. Particularly space based. In comparison it would be almost unlimited.
by tedhowardnz
Completely agree with you Bri.
Having spent 17 years at sea, I have a lot of practical experience as to just how harsh and variable the ocean can be.
It seems to make much more sense to me to completely automate the production of solar cells, and to, as you say, do that in space. If we boost the technology to the moon in the first instance, and once it has replicated to a big enough size, use the energy to accelerate earth mass back into earth orbit, where we manufacture it into what we need.
I have been championing this idea at http://www.solnx.org for over two decades now.
Now that we have practical technologies like google’s self driving car it is becoming much easier for many more people to see what seemed obvious to me almost 30 years ago.
We’re getting there.
The biggest impediment to such progress towards radical abundance is in fact the concepts of money and markets.
Markets are great tools for allocating scarce resources, but cannot deal with abundance, and most certainly are not incentivised to produce abundance. Markets require, and thrive upon, scarcity (most profit is made when perceived scarcity is far greater than actual scarcity).
Thus we can expect markets, and market based entities (corporations, and increasingly governments) to be strongly opposed to any mechanism that delivers radical abundance.
This is a non-trivial problem.
Disinventing the concept of money is not going to be easy, and it does seem to me to be required for the long term survival of humanity.
by tedhowardnz
Read “moon mass” for “Earth mass” above
by Renzo Canepari
The device in this article survived the hurricane of the shore of New Jersey last year.