WAVE ENERGY

Marine energy’s single biggest attraction: It is the most predictable and consistent of the New Energies.

Ken Bruder of New Energy Finance (no relation) suggests something NewEnergyNews has recently been advocating, the “co-generation” of offshore wind and marine energy installations from overlapping sites. Bruder: "Wind and wave operators never know what tool they're going to need when something goes wrong out at sea, and all those boat trips become very expensive…It stands to reason that wind and wave should collaborate."

Some consider marine energy aesthetically preferable to offshore wind because it is more inconspicuous. NewEnergyNews thinks people who worry very much about the aesthetics of New Energies haven’t seen what coal mining does to mountains and they don’t know what the ghost town communities around Chernobyl look like.

From that perspective, the minor and diminishing harm that comes to birds and bats from wind and to oceanfloor sealife from marine energy isn’t very significant, though both industries are working hard to eliminate it.

Marine energy’s biggest problem right now is building devices that can withstand the punishment of the ocean environment. That requires money, marine energy’s 2nd biggest problem right now.

Harnessing the power of ocean waves for energy
James Kanter, November 7, 2007 (International Herald Tribune)

WHO
Britain

WHAT
Britain, the island empire, has enormous and almost entirely untapped marine (wave/tide/current) energy resources.

Wave Hub. (click to enlarge)

WHEN
- Presently, according to this article, the Wavegen is the only marine energy device consistently selling electricity to a utility.
- The Wave Hub is expected to be operational in 2009.

WHERE
- The Wavegen is off the Scottish island of Islay.
- Marine energy installations are being developed in Australia and Portugal.
- The British government is financing a wave energy test with Scotland’s Pelamis Wave Power off the remote northern Scottish coast in the Orkney Islands.
- A British regional authority is financing a wave energy testing center on Britain’s southern coast off Cornwall.

WHY
- Wavegen, a joint venture of Siemens and Voight, is attached to shoreline rocks and produces about a megawatt of power.
- The Orkney Island wave energy test uses Pelamis Wave Power’s Pelamis wave energy device, a giant orange sea-snake looking thing that floats on the surface, absorbs the motion of the ocean and translates it into electricity.
- The test off Cornwall is of a transmission “Wave Hub” that sits on the ocean bottom so that marine energy device cables can plug into it like a seabed socket and send their electricity via a 10-mile ocean floor cable to the onshore grid.
- 4 marine energy companies devices will be tested at the Wave Hub (Pelamis, Oceanlinx,). It may deliver as much as 20 megawatts of electricity.
- Many consider marine energy safe to sea life. Surfers don’t like it though studies find it doesn’t interfere with surf.

click to enlarge

QUOTES
- David Weaver, CEO, Oceanlinx, on marine energy’s aesthetics and harmlessness to marine life:"Governments are very much in favor of technologies that are less of an eyesore… A dolphin could come up inside, happily lounge around and swim out again…"
- Tom Thorpe, consultant, Oxford Oceanics: "The sector needs a big player, or big pockets, to accelerate its commercialization…"