Scotland Building Wave Power Farms

eldavojohn writes "Scottish engineers are taking advantage of the huge ocean coast that Scotland enjoys by building a 'wave farm' to harvest electricity from the ocean's powerful waves. These big red tubes have been named the Pelamis System after a sea snake. Max Carcas, the business developer for the firm, says it is 'a bit like a ship at anchor or a flag on a flagpole, it self orientates into the waves ... Waves then travel down the length of the machine and in doing so each of the sections, each of these train carriages, moves up and down and side to side.' These snake-like movements push hydraulic fluid through generators to produce electricity."

Comments

Re:Squawk!!!

[ergo98]

Can someone explain what "democrat" means when used as an adjective? I've heard a similar term "democratic" used as an adjective. Maybe the adjective "democrat" means "the person saying this should get their head out of the punch bowl and stop drinking the kool aid."

Interesting you should mention this particular point. While I do wish I put liberal, to more aptly fit with the grandparent, I happened to be thinking of Gore at the moment which led me to Democrat.

I apologize. While I might be classically conservative, I most certainly am not a Republican, or a supporter of Bush or any Evangelical crusade, or mixing of church and state.

Nonetheless, conservatives (conserve-atives) in no way correlate with the observation of the OP, so the OP probably should have used republican given that it was clearly their real target.

Having said that, I do find it humorous that some act so injured by the term "Democrat", given that it is a word that has been in use to refer to members or supporters of the Democratic party for decades. In fact, why don't you take a look at the URL for The Democratic Party. Yeah, it's the pluralization of democrat given any normal use of the English language.

In fact, what do you know, the dictionary definition includes the definition "Democrat - A member of the Democratic Party.".

So my intended use was exactly right, though you've shown that you've regurgitated one of the standard talking points, apparently drinking a little too much of the kool-aid.

Re:Wrong

[limecat4eva]

Technically true, but a forest of new growth--fifteen years on average, to use your figure--is a very different habitat, able to support a very different ecosystem, than a forest hundreds of years old.

YAUHBS: YA UneconomicaHair Brained Scheme

[Ancient_Hacker]

A page and a half of blather, and not one single salient number. Like the costs. Or the lifetime. Or the maintenance costs. Or the costs in bringing the power to shore. Or the cost of building more peaking power plants to take up the slack. Or how you keep these things in one piece for 20 years or until they pay back their original cost.

A rough guess says these things can't even pay for the interest and maintenance costs, much less ever pay back their original cost in $$,$$$,$$$ or energy.

The basic probelm is the sea has many more hazards, in the way of waves, corrosion, and stress, than it does easily capturable energy.