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Wave Power Fails To Live Up To Promise
the_newsbeagle writes: One of the leading companies developing wave power devices, Ocean Power Technologies, has dramatically scaled down its ambitions. The company had planned to install the world's first commercial-scale wave farms off the coast of Australia and Oregon, but has now announced that it's ending those projects. Instead it will focus on developing next-gen devices. Apparently the economics of wave power just don't make sense yet.
Part of the problem might be that they can't sell the power. The wind farms we currently have are already producing more power than the bonneville power administration is willing to purchase - even though they are under contract to do so.
I seem to recall a news story from a few years ago where they'd tried to put wave power in the Bay of Fundy, where the highest tides in the world are.
Basically, the tides destroyed the machinery in three weeks or so.
So, yes, there's plenty of mechanical energy to harvest. The problem is that it might also be stronger than the stuff you've built.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
People who have never worked in a marine environment just don't understand this. Seawater is nasty, nasty stuff to anything. Plastic, metal, wood - it doesn't matter. Add a mechanical part and it just becomes a nightmare. The navy, for instance, is continuously painting their ships. As in, they never stop painting them. If you have an offshore wind farm, offshore wave farm, or whatever - you will spend far more on maintenance than you ever do on capital costs. And you have to restrict the technology to proven, overbuilt, and simple. Even titanium will fail in salt water (hydrogen embrittlement)... not a nice place to engineer for.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I've been on/around boats and ships my whole life. I think in the past 40 years I've seen 2 propellers changed out, and it had nothing to do with particulates in the water. It was always because it ran aground. If we are talking about big ships, sorry but I've never seen a prop changed out, even when going into dry dock (where it is usually performed due to damage). most of the time you need to work on the prop system its because you forgot to replace the sacrificial anode and you have to replace the shaft. Replacing a propeller on a ship is in no way a basic job, nor is it performed regularly.
The great pacific garbage patch has a density of 4 small pieces of plastic per cubic meter. You wouldn't even notice it if you were sailing through it.
South Australia is 30% renewable despite a current federal government that is openly hostile to clean energy. The reasoning behind that ideological hostility is not difficult to spot - coal is our #1 export. India has recently declared that large scale PV solar is cheaper than Australian imported brown coal and is switching 400M people to solar over the next decade or so. Prices for coal are way down and mines are currently being mothballed, even those mining the high quality coking coal used to make chinese steel have seen recent mine closures.
The anti-science luddites in charge of this country can see the writing on the wall for the global coal industry, the words "stranded assets" are scaring them shitless. They lack the wisdom and intellectual independence required to plan a smooth transition so they do what politicians do best, fight it tooth an nail with tabloid propaganda and rigged domestic markets.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Yeah, they were proposing and building these giant 140ft by 40ft monstrosities that would have been disruptive to fishing and wildlife, and totally incompatible with the expectations of the community. Oregonians support wave power, but it needs to be slender buoys that are more like artificial kelp; something that creates artificial habitat, not something large and industrial that pushes nature out of the way.
There are actually a bunch of other pilot projects, some of which are more likely to move forwards.
Also keep in mind, they only had approval for the pilot project to test the feasibility. Nobody promised any permits for the large scale project. The pilot would have had to prove not only that it generated power, but also that it didn't interfere with wildlife or fishing. And it wasn't designed to meet the actual standards it would have needed to meet. Probably they thought they could bribe their way through, found out that doesn't work here, and are winding it down and blaming efficiency delays.
And, it turns out they don't have funding anyways, so they can't really move the project.
They admit in their press release that other companies have more mature products not only on the market, but proven.