Slashdot Mirror
Ocean Energy Tech To Be Tested Off Australian Coast
cylonlover writes "The researchers at Australia's BioPower Systems evidently looked at kelp, and thought, 'what if we could use that swaying action to generate power?' The result was their envisioned bioWAVE system: 'At the base of each bioWAVE system would be a triangular foundation, keeping it anchored to the sea floor. Extending up from the middle of that foundation would be a central column, topped with multiple blades — these would actually be more like a combination of the kelp's blades and floats, as they would be cylindrical, buoyant structures that just reach to the surface. The column would join the foundation via a hinged pivot, allowing it to bend or swivel in any direction. Wave action (both at the surface and below) would catch the blades and push them back and forth, in turn causing the column to move back and forth relative to the foundation. This movement would pressurize fluid within an integrated hydraulic power conversion module, known as an O-Drive. The movement of that fluid would spin a generator, converting the kinetic energy of the waves into electricity, which would then be delivered to shore via subsea cables.'"
Didn't anyone else see Southland Tales? I don't think we can take this risk too lightly.
Diffuseness and environmental considerations will keep this from being a significant source of energy. Bank on it.
Dog is my co-pilot.
In other news a new alternative energy project provides free fish blending service for Austrailian sharks.
Funny that people assume this isn't harmful because studies have shown that low frequency sounds from turbines, generators, and the like are damaging to local ecology.
Still, nothing is going to be 100% safe. I just can't stand "greenie" morons who think there won't be problems. They may be different problems but they're still problems.
THIS is the year of commercial tidal power.
FTA, for those who care:
The $5 million grant will go towards an AUD$14 million (US$14,365,000) four-year pilot demonstration unit, to be installed at a grid-connected site near Port Fairy, Victoria.
Will it fit in my car?
The swells and waves have got noticeably stronger over my 50 years holidaying on the Otway coast, so I would very much welcome anything that could take any energy out of them and make it more useful elsewhere.
Then I might get back to diving more than once or twice per summer, down from better than every second day in years gone by.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Why didn't we do this before? I see nothing in this article describing anything in the technology that wasn't technically possible 20 or 40 years ago. There's not even sophisticated CFD behind the design : it appears to just be a float on the end of a rod.
That isn't good for it's future prospects, then : if the technology has not advanced, then likely this machine will face the difficulties that they had last time they tried this.
I'm imagining all kinds of horrible sea life buildup and corrosion and damage in storms causing it to be uneconomical. Each unit has a whole generator, transformer, cables, everything that it needs to support.
Someone could help me with my gravity mill and have free power for the mechanical limits of the machine itself.
We already had this idea for air using piezo-electric cylinders. Can't we just sink these into tidal areas and generate power the same way, without all the loss of conversion?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
This is great! I absolutely love alternative renewable energy sources to offset our dependence on fossil fuels! Keep up the good work Ausies, I can't wait to see what you crazy bastards come up with next!
Another system just off the coast of Fremantle, Australia (west coast of Australia) http://www.carnegiewave.com/index.php?url=/ceto/ceto-overview Does not produce electricity directly but very high pressure sea water which can then be used directly in a desalination plant and the waste run through a hydraulic turbine to generate mechanical / electrical energy. Given that wave energy is nearly constant around the clock, generating fresh water rather than electricity does have its advantages, doubly so in a very dry part of the world. ZombieEngineer
"Tide goes in, tide goes out? How does it work? Nobody knows."
--Bill O'Riely
Get your free Dropbox account with 2 GB Free storage!
Variations of harvesting ocean energy go back to at least the 1800's. All of them start with free energy, we'll use the tides or waves or currents. I'm sure with some googling you could find variations going back even before then.
All of them end with the lesson that sailors learned thousands of years ago. The sea is a harsh mistress. To be put more bluntly, every single one of these ends with a variation of 'maintenance costs exceeded projections and we're going to hold off on future deployment until the technology improves'.
At some point you think mankind would re-learn that nature is still perfectly capable of issuing things that are beyond our ability exploit and leave well enough alone.
Love the idea, as a matter of principal I like renewable energy forms. But to get real it's impractical and it might as well be the patent offices #2 automatic refusal right behind perpetual motion machines.
I did a bit of work at a pump storage mini-hydro plant once (only two little 250MW generators) which is used to supply power at peak times so operates at about the same time each day. Lined up at the netting designed to keep idiots from driving their skiboats up to the outlets were a lot of very large turtles and a cormorant on nearly every float - just waiting. Each day a lot of very confused fish get dumped at that spot.
The turbines in that case wouldn't mince the fish - the blades are fairly blunt, run at relatively low revolutions and are so far apart that I entered the tunnel behind a turbine by climbing through a gap between two blades. Of course it was all shut down for the week with the pipework exiting the turbine removed.
To put it more bluntly, you are not aware to the tidal power station that's been running at Le Havre since the 1950s (for example), so I think your blanket generalistion says more about yourself than any of the technologies in question.
There's a very, very simple reason why this tech isn't going anywhere. It has nothing to do with whether or not the maintainence problems are solvable at some cost.
All wave energy is is water pushed by wind. Thus, you are capturing energy that was originally offshore winds. For any given number of dollars, you could try to tap this energy source by :
Placing your device in the air, where all the internal workings are available for inspection and you can choose a location with relatively rare adverse weather events (like the interior of a country away from the coast)
Placing your device under water, with all the maintenance costs that involves and the need for scuba gear and high $$$ divers to even work on it.
Unless we somehow run out of good spots to put windmills on land, it will always make more sense to spend the next marginal dollar on another windmill (or solar panel, when the price per panel finally gets cheap enough)
It's possible in theory that some day wave generators might be cheap enough to be worth using instead of burning natural gas or coal. But at that point, wind and/or solar will by definition be even cheaper THAN THAT because the same materials science that made the wave generators work has made the solar/wind even cheaper!
They have been doing something like this off the coast of Portugal since 2008.
Ocean Energy Tech To Be Tested Off Australian Coast
Nowadays results would have had to be enhanced even further should they have decided to test in say Turkmenistan, or closer to home in Nebraska. It is no longer so that most scientists would have shunned the proposition should some idiot have offered them a financial incentive.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Why is this all written in conjunctiv? So many "woulds"?
Extending up from the middle of that foundation would be a central column, topped with multiple blades â" these would actually be more like a combination of the kelp's blades and floats, as they would be cylindrical, buoyant structures that just reach to the surface. The column would join the foundation via a hinged pivot, allowing it to bend or swivel in any direction. Wave action (both at the surface and below) would catch the blades and push them back and forth, in turn causing the column to move back and forth relative to the foundation. This movement would pressurize fluid within an integrated hydraulic power conversion module, known as an O-Drive. The movement of that fluid would spin a generator, converting the kinetic energy of the waves into electricity, which would then be delivered to shore via subsea cables.
After all systems like this already exist and can simply be bought on the market. Most currently running plants however use compressed air instead of hydraulics.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Irregular Pattern Design sounded like a cool engineering concept. Too bad.
Browse at -1 to keep an eye out for abuses. Mail the admin (help(ata)slashdot.org) URLs showing abuse (include the cid link please!).
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Portugal is starting wave energy production next year... and so is Scotland
Really?! I guess the wave motion generators off of Portugal, Scotland, and Cornwall were just small scale tests....
mark
Seems rather complicated compared to the vast amount of other approaches to harvesting wave energy. This one, for example, is so much simpler:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYEQaU_1Ak0
No need for divers, no need to attack it to the sea floor other than using an anchor any ship can just drag it into place. Or back in case maintenance needs to be done.
0x or or snor perron?!
Let's crunch some numbers.
The one-megawatt installation will use four devices which operate in 40-45 meters of water -- so, 250 kW / device. From the looks of the pictures, these devices are about as wide as they are tall. Let's allow some room between adjacent units. Space them 150 meters apart, in a hexagonal pattern. Allow 75 meters of clearance at the edges of the field.
A field of 37 devices spaced as I describe covers 1.09 square kilometers. They should generate 9.25 MW. That works out to 8.5 MW / km^2, or 8.5 W/m^2. By comparison, some current figures for the power density of wind energy and and solar photovoltaic installations are 1.2 W/m^2, and 6.7 W/m^2, respectively.
I believe that wave energy is less intermittent than wind or solar as well.
The fact that this power-generating approach uses an enclosed turbine means that there is little potential for the system to make accidental sushi.
Looks pretty decent to me.
Nice little trick there to pretend to appeal to authority. The link just goes to a server load message on the Financial Times - was that deliberate? Even if it wasn't what would they would know anything about engineering anyway?
Why don't you just write in something that contradicts what I was reading in the 1980s about rewinding the generators at Le Havre since you are pretending to correct me instead of misleading the other readers? It's not a very big power station but it has been there for a long time. I'll bet google will help if you actually want to do something other than mislead people.
It's really just a small hydro installation using the height difference of the tides - pump storage without the pump effectively.
If you are going to make blanket statements about something it's a good idea to know something about the subject you are commenting on first, especially here where you'll find engineers from every field.
I'm assuming you mean 1.2W/m^2 of land (footprint), NOT the 25W/m^2 extractable from a 20mph air flow. Power = 1/2*rho*A*V^3
where rho=1.2kg/m^3 for air and 1000kg/m^3 for water. But then, if you do mean land what size turbine are you talking about?