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

Obligatory Quote from a Scottish Engineer

[thewiz]

"We canna create any more power, Captain! They're wiggling as fast as they can!"

Environmental Impact: Scotland the Wave

[aapold]

Is no one concerned about the potential impact this will have, by providing a drag on the waves that would else naturally strike the coast, thus potentially reducing the habitat for species adatped to the wave-heavy environment of Scotland's coast? What about the mollusks and other marine invertebrates who can only spread and prosper via wave transort...

Its just like those people who advocate wind power and never consider the impact of slowing down the world's winds, thus reducing the natural spread of wind-bourne seeds and so on...

This sounds strangely familiar...

[Lurker2288]

So, this whole system is just a series of tubes?

Re:Development costs irrelevant to deployment ...

[AugustZephyr]

Hopefully the R&D is an overhead and not a "sunk cost". These things are supposed to float.

Re:Environmental Impact: Scotland the Wave

[MajinBlayze]

You can indeed run out of wind, slowing it down to nearly nothing with enough windmills. Ditto for "a mill wheel". Each one removes energy from the water, changes the environment up and downstream. With enough of them, the water will practically come to a stop and never reach its destination.

I'm trying to picture how this would look in the headlines: "Too many watermills: water dissappears from rivers!"

Re:Environmental Impact: Scotland the Wave

[agbinfo]

That's nothing.

A much bigger problem is that the waves are generated by the pull from the moon (or so I was told). If we reduce the amount or amplitude of ocean waves, this could have an effect on the moon.

Think about it... just like current can create a magnetic field and a magnetic field can create a current, the gravitational pull from the moon is creating waves.

If we stop these waves, the moon's orbit could change.

We will all die because we wanted to create clean energy.

Let's stop this madness before it's too late.