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.

Comments

Oregon...

[Nerrd]

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.

Mechanical stresses ...

[gstoddart]

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.

OpenHydro -- the Irish company which installed the world's first 1-megawatt tidal turbine in the Bay of Fundy -- and its partner Nova Scotia Power deployed the 10-tonne turbine on the floor of the Minas Passage in November 2009.

Then just 20 days later, all 12 turbine rotor blades were destroyed by tidal flows that were two and a half times stronger than for what the turbine was designed.

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.

Re:When doing anything involving the ocean

[MightyYar]

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.