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Alternative Energy: Power Via Coastal Wave Motion.
lavalamp writes "Scottish company Ocean Power Delivery has developed a sectional-torpedo-looking-thing as a means to transform the raw fury of the sea into electricity! I'm curious to see what happens when another drunk Exxon captain plows into a field of these things. They just secured a 8.6m (usd) in funding to continue research and build a large scale prototype." The company has won a contract to produce a 750kw "plant" off of the scottish coast and has an mou to produce a 2Mw project off of the coast of Vancouver Island in Canada. While this is far from being free energy, it is a pretty interesting way of deriving power from the tides. A side benefit is that surfers will finally be able to rail like their boarding cousins.
This isn't the only wave-energy project currently in development. There's also a project by a Dutch company (AWS BV.), called the Archimedes Wave Swing. Their 6MW pilot plant is to be tested from April onwards in Portugal. It's a really interesting concept, using the law of Archimedes to generate power.
You can find it at http://www.waveswing.com
I had heard something about this on NPR. I do not believe they indeed on trying to use the power to power homes and such, but instead, to run a desalinization plant to provide freshwater to remote places.
It becomes cost effective because it would be overly expensive to provide power out to these remote areas which desparately need fresh water. It supposedly opens up a whole bunch of land to agriculture that was unusable before.
I remember hearing about this being done before for some third world country but it failing miserably because of storms and such.
Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to find much info on google so I could be mistaken.
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