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New Scottish Wave Energy Generator Unveiled
MikeChino writes "We've learned about Scotland's wave energy initiatives in the past, and just this morning the nation unveiled Aquamarine Power's next-generation Oyster 800 wave power plant. The new generator can produce 250% more power at one third the cost of the first full-scale 315kw Oyster that was installed in Orkney in 2009. The device's shape has been modified and made wider to enable it to capture more wave energy, and a double seabed pile system allows for easier installation."
...that scales beyond kilt-sized output and doesn't smell of beans.
Some kilts are longer than others, friend.
...the energy cannot be used to power homes or industry; it can only be used to inflate bagpipes.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
What is it with the British and naming tech after oysters? At least this one makes more sense than the London Oyster card.
Have gnu, will travel.
This is also the first power plant in the world to be painted tartan.
Well... every great plan has to have a doomsday scenario or two. This one is the worst yet.
As we know the tides are primarily caused by gravitational drag from the orbit of the moon. The moon has enough velocity that its orbit is actually widening, meaning the grip between the two bodies is getting ever so infinitesimally smaller. One generator stealing energy from this system is nothing, but once we start investing in it hardcore... the reduction in wave energy leads to extra gravitational drag on the moon, slowing its orbit... causing it to stop advancing, and be pulled in towards the earth.
By the time this is noticed, it is too early to convince politicians that something must be done now, and in fact, the push to convert more power over to wave energy.
How does it end? Well political infighting, and a new ad campaign by the deep ocean energy harvesters association begins extolling the virtues of the new larger moon, and begin funding both PR campaigns for surfing associations and contests.... and the new moon cult which has begun preaching that the moon is actually Jesus returning to earth. As part of their agreement with the energy harvesters, the cult members primary ritual consists of running Air conditioning all day long, with their windows open and bitcoin mining.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I hope it works. It looks like it will start rusting the second its submerged.
"A farm of just 20 Oyster 800 devices would generate sufficient power for up to 15,000 homes"
or... 1 device can power 750 homes.
What's the cost? Since it wasn't mentioned anywhere in the press release, er, article, I assume it's still absurdly expensive.
Also, I still want to know what happens when the wind stops blowing, the sun stops shining, or waves stop coming.
WOW. Of the 1st 12 comments concerning this improved technology 10 are put downs or one sort or another.
Somehow I don't see that happening if it had been invented in the US. Oh yeah, maybe a joke or two but not 10 out of 12. Pretty damn sad.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
It would be wise for you to go look up the word "nation" in a dictionary.
Scotland was a nation, even had its own King. Robert (The Bruce) defeated the English at Bannockburn.
Clean Oil - It's So Clean, You Can Drink It
Capacity factors I found online for wave power put it at 30%-45% with a suggestion that 35% was a good average. That is, if the unit is rated at 800 kW peak, you can expect it to produce 280 kW averaged over the entire year.
Onshore wind farms have a 20%-25% capacity factor. Offshore wind seems to have a 30%-40% capacity factor, with turbines in the 1 - 4 MW range. So this wave power unit will on average generate slightly less energy than one of the smaller offshore wind turbines. In the KE = 0.5mv^2 equation, water has about 800x more mass than air, but the average wind speed is a lot higher than the average speed of the waveheight up and down. Enough so that it seems wind ends up having the advantage. (This is just a comparison, not a trade-off. You could for example install these wave power machines in between your offshore wind turbines.)
Comparing to conventional energy sources, the typical coal plant in the U.S. is about 340 MW with a 65% capacity factor, for about 220 MW average generation. So that's about 800 of these wave energy generators. The typical nuclear plant is about 1.55 GW with a 90% capacity factor, for about 1.4 GW average generation, or about 5000 of these wave energy generators. So we've still got a long way to go before these can truly replace conventional energy sources.
Unfortunately I can't find the price for one of these units, probably since they're still very much in the R&D phase. So I can't do a cost comparison. Also note that the Wikipedia entry for this project says it has three flaps each of which is capable of 800 kW. So depending on if the summary or wikipedia is right, the average power generated may be a factor of 3 higher.
If they incorporated a Scottish Yoke, just for the fun of it...
I can't stand this shit: "new power generation technology; it's 250% more powerful than the last one!" Yeah, that's fucking awesome - except that you're not really telling us anything. It can take 800kW? Great. What do you expect the mean and standard deviation of that output to be like? How much do you expect one of these units to cost? What, precisely, do you have to quantify this technology's value to the human race other than vagaries about green energy? We've got renewables - wind, solar pv, solar therm, hydro, geo - why is this one special?
This is not a put-down of the technology; this is a put-down of shitty publish-the-press-release technology reporting. Give us fucking numbers.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
I read "Scottish Wave Energy" and the picture that comes to mind is some red-haired bearded guys in Kilts doing the wave.
..the waves rule you!
You misunderstand motive; it isn't about where it was invented, it is about Big Energy not wanting competition. So slam it, put it down...discourage investment...discourage deployment.
Speaking of which, I do hope my surviving relatives in Britain understand that we in the U.S. tend to bomb the crap out of anybody who doesn't cooperate with - let alone threatens - the energy monopolies.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
NO, the northern area is called SCOTLAND and it will be free of that crapola ....
Typical historically ignorant bullshit; Under that "accepted usage", the United Kingdom is not a nation since it is part of the European Union.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
The pictures show a big expensive jointed float.
Wind turbines are also big and expensive stiff machines.
When I as a physicist and engineer ponder on this, I get cheap light efficient constructions of film, like paragliders and balloons.
Why is this so?
Perhaps generators are expensive to subsidize industry.
Perhaps I am a genius.
Which is more likely?
The European Union does not change national status. Each of the members of the EU is a soverign nation, complete with passports, Internet country codes etc. and all the trappings of sovereignty. Being an EU member doesn't mean you stop being a nation. There is no United States of Europe, there is no European Union passport. Only passports of the sovereign nations that make up the EU.
Scotland is not a sovereign nation, it makes up part of a nation, and the sovereign nation of which it makes a part is called the United Kingdom. Scotland stopped being a nation as soon as it was absorbed into the United Kingdom. You can't get a Scottish passport.
There are of course people in Scotland who want it to become a sovereign nation again, and if Scotland achieves this presumably it will be a member of the EU, which will not change its status as a sovereign nation.
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Since everyone will be confused about whether Scotland is a country or not, whether it's part of England or not or something called Great Britain or the United Kingdom, here is a video that explains Britain, the United Kingdom, Scotland etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Looks like from your figures it's going to cost more at point of purchase ten times as much to produce electricity as a coal fired alternative. But you can read the figures differently. A couple of thoughts here: ;-)
- first of all, early tech always costs more than mature technologies. Coal fired power generation of electricity is maybe 100 years old? so maybe we need to wait for a few years to see how the costs level up compared to this new tech
- second, total lifespan costs need to be considered. You've noted the cost of the purchase of the wave generator but not indicated the cost over the lifespan: the table you points to includes this detail further down and suggests coal fired is actually $0.15 / kw compared to $0.16/kw for wave power when this is taken into account (and including carbon costs). So even at this early stage it's not "a magnitude higher"
- trust me, the seas off the north of Scotland have waves 'pretty regularly'
Deliberately writing a comment which tries to confuse the term "soverign nation" with "nation" does not make your comment on topic. As a hint, if there wasn't a difference between the terms "soveriegn nation" and "nation" then people wouldn't tend to write it out in full.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Wrong, eg. http://www.rbs6nations.com/en/home.php - Scotland, England, Wales, France, Italy and Ireland.
No it isn't. That's a small single generator of probably 1970s or earlier vintage, and you have several of them in a single power plant because you need a lot of cooling, water treatmentt, coal handling etc gear whether you have one unit or several. Many of the concrete cooling towers you see are designed to cool two seperate units for example.
If a power plant has for example four 650MW units that adds up to more than your number for nuclear, which is also wrong because there are some much bigger plants there along with the tiny research reactors and the many very small miltary run "power" plants in developing countries that bring the average down. Don't confuse "average" with typical and compare apples and orchards.
However, it's a myth that stainless steel is the best thing for salt water. It is fine for above-deck use because it gets washed clean by freshwater in rain. But the interesting ingredients of seawater can cause pinholing and stress corrosion in stainless steels, though A4/316 is better than most. Bronze (tin/copper alloy) is good and is traditionally used for throughhulls and seacocks. The usual solution (pun intended) is of course not to let seawater near any working fluid circuits but to use either hydraulic oils or a mixture of propylene glycol and water (anti-freeze) - use propylene rather than ethylene because it doesn't kill fish if it leaks out.
Corrosion engineering is a really fascinating discipline with many unexpecteds and gotchas.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The video is wrong in one respect - it refers to Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland as "four co-equal and sovereign nations" when in fact none of them is sovereign - only the United Kingdom is. Scotland, Wales and NI have less sovereignty than a US state, in that the British parliament can in theory still legislate in any matter across the whole of the UK. In practice it doesn't do so (or does so only at the request of the devolved legislatures) because it would be political suicide.
I love renewable, clean energy, I do, but I wish journalists remembered enough junior school level mathematics to understand why technology like this will not be replacing coal, oil, and nuclear power any time soon. This is a positive step forward, but lets not pretend it's going to solve the looming energy crisis.
Lets do some back-of-the-envelope maths to understand why:
The specs of the Oyster 2 say that it generates a peak output of 800kW and has a length of 26 meters. Of course, you can't put them exactly side-by-side, not all locations are suitable, and 800kW is the maximum burst power output, not the average power, but lets just use optimistic numbers for the moment.
I can't find power usage numbers for Scotland, but the average citizen of Great Britain uses 5218.2 W total, factoring in indirect energy use (oil, coal, manufacturing, etc...). Multiply that by the population of Scotland, which is apparently 5.2 million people, and you get a reasonable sounding 27 GW of power usage.
This means that the total length of coastline needed to generate that amount of power using technology like the Oyster 2 is: 5218.2 W * 5,200,000 * 26 m / 800,000 W = 882 km.
That doesn't sound too bad relative to Scotland's 11,800 km of coastline, but that's counting every little bay, nook, cranny, and island. The coastline of a country depends on how you measure it. Wave energy comes from big waves created in the ocean, so a much more reasonable estimate for the coastline is the perimeter of a circle with the same area as the land mass. For Scotland, this is a mere 995 km, from which we may as well subtract the 95 km land border with England, leaving 900 km.
This means that the estimate of 882 km of needed wave power generators is 98% of the available coastline. Oops.
Don't believe me? Here's another source that states that the total exploitable power available near the shore (ignoring overheads, inefficiencies, etc...) is 18.5 kW/m, which works out to 16.7 GW. In practice, there's no hope of achieving anywhere near 100% of that. The maths for solar and wind power is similar, for much the same reasons.
The inevitable conclusion of this kind of trivial mathematics is that densely populated countries would have to pave over huge fractions of their land with solar cells, put wind farms on every hilltop, and surround much of their coastline with wave generators to even begin to approach their present power needs, let alone future growth.
Don't think biofuels like ethanol or biodiesel help either, the most efficient plants are only 9% efficient at best, in ideal tropical conditions, and that's not factoring in the energy overheads of fertilizer, harvesting, and conversion!
Meanwhile, a nuclear power plant with an output of 1 GW requires a mere hectare of land area, which is why nations that have leadership with some common sense are planning on building more nuclear power, not less.
On the bright side, I live in Australia, where we have plenty of land, coastline, sunlight, coal, and uranium. This all sounds like someone else's problem to me! 8)
Typical sniping, armchair expertism from the majority of /. commenters.
If you haven't got anything constructive to say, or haven't actually invented/implemented a decent energy alternative to fossil fuel, how about fucking off this site forever, you tedious, self interested cunts.
By the accepted usage, Scotland (England, Wales, etc) is not a nation. The nation is the United Kingdom.
WRONG.. very very wrong.. i suggest you read up on the4 articles of the union bud.. this is why Scotland has it's own legal system and is recognised as a nation in it's own right on that very document
England is even worse in this respect in that it does not have a regional assembly. Thus all England's legislation is done by the UK parliament.
134 comments and not one references making a gun using wave motion. Slashdot, I am disappoint.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
in that the British parliament can in theory still legislate in any matter across the whole of the UK. In practice it doesn't do so (or does so only at the request of the devolved legislatures) because it would be political suicide.
Um, no. I can't speak for Wales or NI, but in Scotland we have absolute control over most of the laws that apply within our borders, which is why the Consent Motion you linked to is even required.
We may not be sovereign (yet) - but we can ignore the vast majority of bloody stupid laws that come out of Whitehall.
Thank you. I was about to make the same joke about Wave Motion Energy, and could it power a spaceship made from the remnants of the Yamato, but, you beat me to it.
I think back to my childhood, hearing that trumpet sound and hearing Orion say "Wave Motion Energy at 100%"
That's still my favorite tv show.... ever.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
...that thing is too big to fit in the average toilet.
Sorry.
You're wrong. The Consent Motion is a practicality that allows Westminster to legislate on Scottish issues where it is agreed that this should happen, so that it doesn't become a constitutional controversy. It isn't strictly required, though. Parliamentary sovereignty still resides at Westminster.
A practical example is the disbanding of the Parliament of Northern Ireland in 1972, which would have been impossible had Westminster not had ultimate power over Northern Ireland.
This is the reason the political situation in the UK is referred to as 'devolution'. It would be a form of federalism if the powers were guaranteed.
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the only thing that counts is that scottland, wales and ingland have their own socker teams in the world champion ships ;D (no idea about northern ireland ... do they play socker there?)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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Perhaps we ought to invest in some nuclear power stations before all that resource gets used up. Don't quote any Fukushima nonsense to me - that event has been handled really well by the team there and the overall result is that the most exposure to radiation of ANYBODY in Japan has been roughly the same as mild sunburn.
Nuclear needs to deal with the disposal issue, but we really need it to provide the firmest baseline for any energy policy.
The SNP response? Let's build a 200mile corridor of the biggest pylons in the UK right through the highlands. Quality idea - devoid of nearly any rational thinking.
Excuse me, Sir,
please do not feed the Trolls.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
By the accepted usage, Scotland (England, Wales, etc) is not a nation. The nation is the United Kingdom.
Sorry, but the most important international organisation, FIFA, disagrees with you.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
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So who is held responsible when it is found that whales and other creatures are killed in a random collision with this floating hazard?
... it's crap!
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