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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."
... a similar system was in place, however the locals misinterpreted it and put it in the middle of a football field.
Anonymous Coward
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/354882 0.stm ive read a few other reports on the matter, At the current rate of progression it was noted that we would only have 10% of the power from renewable energy by 2020, However i have read a few reports that were speculating that wave generators set up around Scotland could provide 20-25% of Europes power needs. ,. .
If this is so , then it would definantly be a great source of commerce for the region.
Not to mention the positive effect on the enviroment
Yet this will be stiffeld at every turn by the conglomerats who make a fair bit out of natural resource based fuels
In the region of Germany i am currently , i belive a large percentage of the enegry is derived from wind power(a commen sight when driving around here are collections of wind turbines) , If other countrys were to take on schemes such as these we could cut emmison levels by massive ammounts.
This wont hapen though , as oil(coal gas etc) is money and money is power , so untill the well drys up there will be little done about it , bar experiments.
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
The European Union requires 22 percent of electricity consumption to come from renewable energy sources -- such as solar, wind and wave -- by 2010.
i did not know that fact, thought it was 8%-10%, but it's a good goal, although i doubt it will be reached. there is lot of opposition to 'conventional' methods of renewable energy, like wind energy.
here in holland (a windy place) people think they're ugly, noisy and potentionally dangerous. and the same environmental groups that dislikes carbondioxide and nuclear energy als dislike the fact birds may fly into those things. for long time, people have suggested off-shore solutions, like off-shore windmill parks.. but they're expensive.
so, i find it aprticulair interesting that a country like portughal pioneers in those steps, instead of 'hi-tec' countries like holland, germany or france.
guess it's just a matter of oil prices to raise more, so alternative power sources automatically gets economical benefits. after all, the techniques are there, short-view economics and lack of vision is keeping those from being implemented.
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
Then we had steam, and burned fossil fuels to make it. Tearing up the ground, polluting the air, the water, and eventually damaging our whole world.
Finally we return to extracting energy from water. No compaints from me on that score.
Are available at the company's site. Flash animation of how the system works can be found here.
:-)
From their site:
A typical 30MW installation would occupy a square kilometre of ocean and provide sufficient electricity for 20,000 homes. Twenty of these farms could power a city such as Edinburgh.
And:
The 750kw full-scale prototype is 120m long and 3.5m in diameter...
So this isn't very different from the power density of, say, wind turbines. It has the advantage that you can locate the 40,000 12m long 3.5m diameter devices - not to mention X00,000 anchoring cables - out of sight in the ocean, instead on the top of ridges where they stick out like sore thumbs and chop the occasional bird migration.
Still, you'd need something lime X000 km^2 to provide all of the UK's electricity this way. With that amount, people will start complaining. Also, their site gives no estimation of cost per kw. A salt ocean with high waves is a very machine-hostile environment, so these devices will have a very finite life time, and at the sizes they give, they are anything but cheap.
So while this is very clever, and nice, it doesn't get us off the hook for a sustainable energy source. Floating nuclear plants, now - that's a thought. Its the ultimate in "not in my back yard".
A little more detail about how that stuff works wouldn't have hurt in that story.
Ocean Power Delivery Limited has a website! And they have a nice little Flash animation that explains those sausages.
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.
Wait, let me see if I am understanding you correctly.
You are trying to say that the process of building a machine ONCE will generate way more CO2 than a CONTINUING, NEVER-ENDING process of making power?
Are you trolling?
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...
They are always waving. The Queens waves are a bit feeble though, dunno if I would want her powering the electric shower in the morning.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
Ah, well now, here you have broken one of the key rules of /.
In order to be a grammar Nazi, you have to either deliver a long and carefully written piece of prose detailing how and why the editors makde a mistake, and providing helpful tips for anyone else who is confused, or be horribly sarcastic b'y makin'g t'he mis'take aga'in and aga'in.
Calling them fuckos just doesn't cut it, I'm afraid.
Do some actual reading about engineering and nuclear physics instead of making nonsensical statements about controlled bomb-blasts.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
Domestic cats kill millions of birds annually. Windows kill many thousands of birds who fly into them. Animal-loving environmentalists often keep cats, and live in dwellings with windows, so they can gaze out at their beloved nature. Homes without windows would be more energy-efficient. Perhaps we can harness cats for energy, but they sleep 16 hours a day.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
There are very few plants in service that were built after Chernobyl lost containment, and none of those are in the USA - the "univac mainframe" is what you have.
And it is all we will get if people do not appreciate the differences in security and efficiency between the new designs and the old ones.
Chernobyl made it really difficult to get people to accept the building of new and more secure reactor plants to relieve and eventually replace the old, shoddy ones.
In a fair world, refrigerators would make electricity.
If its comparable to the many thousands of tons of carbon dioxide emitted when building coal / wood power plants, the question is irrelevant.
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.
People don't like nuclear power because of incidents like three mile island and Chernobly ,yet more damage is done each year by the cumulitive effects of coal/gas and oil plants.
I read somewhere that more people die in coal mines in russia every year than the total death toll (including long term cancer deaths) from chernobyl. And chernobyl was a crappy design that would not be allowed in the US. Cancer death estimates vary considerably, however. Additional eurasian cancer deaths would have to be compared to polution related deaths from power plants (which kills thousands every year). Directly attributable deaths for nuclear power, per terawatt years of power generated are 8 for nuclear power, 85 for natural gas, 342 for coal, and 883 for hydroelectric (dam's break). Add some cancer deaths for nuclear and pollution related deaths from fossil fuels. And add global warming related deaths to fossil fuels. Commercial power plants have 11000 reactor years of operation in over 30 countries with two major accidents. That is about one accident per 100 power plants over the projected life of the reactor and future accidents are likely to resemble three mile island rather than chernobyl. And coal plants release more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear plants (yep, coal contains radioactive material).
Average radiation exposure to 2 million people around three mile island was 1mrem compared to 6mrem for a set of chest xrays. Exposure at the plant boundary was 100mrem which is less than the annual background exposure. So, even if you were standing near the plant, your total lifetime radiation exposure was increased by about 1.2%.
Studies indicate that US Nuclear reactors will survive a direct hit from a 767.
Nuclear waste disposal is an issue. Integral Fast Reactors have the potential to reduce the magnitude of this problem considerably.
About a year ago, James Lovelock, of Gaia fame, proposed nuclear power as the only alternative that could stem global warming in time
There is one new technology that is more suited for oil replacement and could be a decent alternative to nuclear as a fossil fuel replacement: Thermal Depolymerization . That is a new technology but a pilot plant is producing 400 barrels of oil per day. When run off of plant (or even animal) material, the net greenhouse emissions are zero and the process consumes waste (and a wider variety of waste than other technologies) rather than creating it.
I live about 30 miles from two nuclear power plants (and the site of what might be the first new power plant built in the US) and less than half a mile from a research reactor.
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.
You just burn them, like any fuel source. ;-)
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Wind power is a technological fix for a political problem... So is wave power
George Monbiot in this article writes:
For "wind" read "wave" and you've got it.
Some fixes may be worth doing... but they are still fixes.
EPRI released a series of reports on economics of ocean wave energy conversion recently. The lifetime average cost of electriciy using Pelamis devices ranged from 9 - 10 cents/kwh in good US sites (but in Maine, 32 c/kwh since the waves suck). That includes millions of dollars in maintenance, overhauls, full-time ship & crew to service them (so it's a realistic number). Here is the final summary report, where you can read it yourself:
R eport_RB_01-14-05.pdf
r ogram=270686&value=05T084.0&objid=297213
t ml [oceanPD]
:-( ) so surfers will still have waves.
r gy/tidalenergy.htm
http://www.epri.com/attachments/297213_009_Final_
[EPRI]
You can read more detailed reports from a listing here, which provides more specific info about each site studied in the US:
http://www.epri.com/targetWhitePaperContent.asp?p
Pelamis has been designed & optimized for years, and works in a wide range of wave climates:
http://www.oceanpd.com/Pelamis/Powermatrixgraph.h
Available wave energy increases with wave period and the square of height and you can see Pelamis stops extracting more energy above 750 kw. Also Pelamis can not convert more than 50% of wave energy available at its best (did my own study at my university, no online references
Tidal barrage is too costly for initial capital and has an enourmous environmental impact. However, tidal current generators, much like "submerged wind turbines" will have a smaller environmental "footprint" and a more modular design:
http://www.racerocks.com/racerock/energy/tidalene
(I'm a graduate student studying wave energy conversion. I hope these links provide some interesting reading...)