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Wave Powered Generator to Power Homes
Eh-Wire writes "A Scottish company, Ocean Power Delivery (OPD) and it's Norwegian backer, Norsk hydro are set install three wave powered generators 3.5 miles off the north coast of Portugal for the Portuguese renewable energy group Enersis. This will be the world's first commercial wave powered generating system. Providing the initial three generators perform as expected, an additional thirty wave powered generators will be installed by the end of 2006. It's estimated the wave powered generator farm will displace 6000 tonnes of carbon dioxide that would otherwise be emitted from conventional electrical generating plants."
http://www.industcards.com/hydro-scotland.htm
Hydro has been one of the main sources of power in scotland since 1930s (some really wonderfull damms with great architecture) , I used to visit them alot when i was younger , a real majesty about them.
the planet is mostly water anyway and with the power of tides and gravity , if we put effort into it i am fairly sure we could get nearly all of our energy needs from water . only problem is that their is little money to get out of it compared to drilling for oil.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Might be an interesting alternative to tidal power, when tides are not strong enough. But I couldn't find much technical information on it.
As for tidal power itself, maybe it's worth noting here that it has been in use for quite some time, even though at only few places. The largest is the 240 Megawatts plant in La Rance in France.
In Northern Ameria, there is The Annapolis Tidal Generating Station.
anything one does to extract energy affects the environment. wind farms and nuclear plants change local micro-climates. i'm curious as to what, if any modeling has been done for 'sausage' farms.
as an aside, these things are certain to confuse and confound first time extra-solar visitors.
EU is proceeding, along with Japan, with a test bed for materials to be used in nuclear fusion reactor, if they ever sort out where it's gonna go. In the mean time, IMO, the best thing that could happen for 'clean' power would be a global standard fission plant along with a set of standards for site requirements. Cookie cutter fission plants would make nuclear power much more affordable. As for nuclear waste, IMO it's pretty arrogant to think we'll be around 50k years from now, while at the same time not being clever enough to figure out how to handle the waste by the time the 50k year countdown ends...
It looks like you where headed down the same direction I was when I first read this. Please someone tell me I'm missing something here because I hate to believe that the people putting this together are that crazy.
First off let's look at the costs. I see them saying that the delivery of units will cost $10.12M. This group also delivers 2250Kw. So I come up with a number of $4497/Kw for the generation. If you try to pay that back over 3 years, it costs $0.17/Kwh (around here the prevailing ratest for power generation are closer to $0.04/Kwh or $0.05/Kwh) And that does not assume that there are any maintenance costs (which is rather ludicrous when you consider a mechanical device in salt water.
Now for the environmental question. Is this truly a benefit? If I setup enough of these units to generate say 10% of the worldwide power requirements, what happens to the ocean currents? Do I not create a severe ocean current problem that could radically change the climate of given portions of the earth? I seriously think this would have a more far reaching effect than the emissions that currently exist.
I guess as I see it this way: It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it will be practical without some serious modification the design. We basically have a prototype situation here. Try it out. Find out what happens. Then talk about building more. Anything else is pure hype and lacking in the necessary data to extrapolate the benefits and risks.
That grass looks pretty green to me...
Just because humans can't live there without getting cancer doesn't mean that other life forms aren't able to.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
Decent point, however the problem I see is that everyone is looking at the cost of PRODUCING a set amount of electricity. That is irrelevent. You need to look at the total cost of production and DISPOSAL. The cost of disposal from a Nuclear plant is hudreds of times higher than the cost of disposal from a coal plant. Some could even argue that disposal costs are INFINITE! There are other options other than nuclear. Coal isn't perfect either, but just like nuclear, new coal plants could be built clean.
A few years back, 3m designed (I believe it was 3m) a filter for coal emmissions to remove ALL harmful materials from the emissions. 100%. The problem was cost. I believe one of the main materials was crushed diamond or something like that. Good Ol' W decided that they shouldn't be required, and funding shouldn't be spent on development and requirement of such filtering systems. So, should we blame the cancer rates on the coal plants, then build nuclear, or simply look to who is to blame for these emissions.
Does anyone know anything about these filters? I didn't find a reference in a quick search, and I'm not crazy.......well maybe.
6.5% is a "drop in the ocean"? How can you just dismiss a number like that?
If someone where to say "tomorrow 13 out of every 200 people are going to just drop dead with no warning" would that be inconsequential as well?
6.5% is a HUGE amount on a global scale. Hell, 1% is a huge amount... Every little bit helps.
This had me checking the calendar to see if it was the 1st of April, and then a map to confirm my suspicions (and check that nothing had changed drastically since the last time I looked).
I believe I'm correct in stating that Portugal doesn't actually have a North coast.
> 1 square km for 20,000 households; 20sq km for a city of Edinburgh
So, 20sq km for 450K folk, or roughly 13,000sq km for the US. US Coastline is 6000 km w/o Alaska, or 13K with Alaska. A double line of these off Alaska's coast would about do it for the US. How far off the coast should these be?
Of course, entire ocean's about 320M sq km, and we've had transoceanic communication cables a hundred years before my birth...
These pods are a little under 500 feet long. That means they will be selective for some period of waves energy, with a peak in the 13-14 second wave period band (see wavelength chart at http://www.blakestah.com/surf/oldprediction.html). It will also have limited response at fundamentals - longer wavelengths - because these sausages are linked.
There's a problem in this. First of all, the little crappy windchop that surfers hate is in the short period bands, 5-8 seconds or so. And these pods will not suck off any of that energy - the chop will go right on through. Whereas the surfable energy - the long period stuff, will be knocked down substantially. Not good. Also, the bulk of the ocean's wave energy is in this chop. So they are throwing out the baby to drink the bathwater.
They need to redesign it to not have any selectivity for periods over 10 seconds - or wavelengths over 100 meters. Take the bulk of the energy, sap it out, and make the oceans smooth and glassy while the long period waves cruise on through and generate stoke for surfers worldwide.
The pod design is really cool. There are a few things they could do to gear it up also - like load the bulk of the weight and volume at the links to maximize leverage, and broaden the aspect ratio closer to 0.5...I'm envisioning links 10m long and 5m wide with never more than 5 connected serially. That saps the oceans of the wind chop, while leaving the longer period surf (which is more rare anyway) alone. Smaller, easier to deploy (and replace) units, which a physical design using more leverage. And surfing would actually benefit from such a change.