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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.
Ha! Ha!
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
"A spokesperson for Ocean Power Technologies announced, that after a number of years of testing and development efforts, that Wave farms are a wash."
*ducks* *runs*
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Primary examples would be installed on sea installations, like say oil drilling platforms. Why ship in fuel to an oil drilling platform, when you can simply install a wavepower generator to provide the power. Then, once you find oil, you don't have to get rid of the wave power generator. Keep it and use wave power to get the oil, rather than burning oil just to get more oil.
Also, I could easily see a small scale wave power generator designed for boats, particularly house boats.
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Take you expected costs, double it, then throw the piece of paper way because it's still useless.
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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.
Because artificial manipulations of free markets always works out as intended!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
Ocean warming is a bigger opportunity. Jabbing a thermal collector into a volcanic vent, rolling it through a sterling engine as a cooling system, with the cold side submerged in the cold ocean.
A lot of new, green tech is ludicrous. People want solar farms in the desert because of all the arid heat and lack of clouds, but discount the fragile ecosystem. Wind farms take up much more space than nuclear plants for the same power output. Hydrogen is difficult to store without supercooling, and is only a storage scheme and not a generation scheme, and only operates at 50%-80% efficiency. Hydroelectric is an environmental disaster.
Direct heat applications from solar-thermal water heating are about the only thing that make sense. Their efficiency is high, and their cost is low. A small, 1.2 square meter collector provides 3000BTU/hr, about 85% of a kW; I can fit over 20 of these on my roof at a sun-receiving angle and spacing, giving over 65,000 BTU/hr average throughout the day. My roof can produce 19kW of heat output, while I only need 3kW to stay warm or cool--the AC breaker is 30A, providing about 3kW of cooling.
A hydronic coil off the water heater, an absorption cooler, or so on can harvest the heat collected by less than $2000 of tubes and a total of $3000 of equipment to provide for about $2500 annual air space and water heating and cooling in my house. Excess generated heat could theoretically drive a sterling engine to produce a small amount of electricity, but the investment for more tubes to generate a useful amount of electricity would be unjustifiable; I can buy 100% solar electricity for 12 cents per kWh.
Thus, in just over a year, I can recover my investment in solar water heating by incorporating space heating and cooling, assuming I was in the market for a new furnace and air conditioner anyway--the furnace would be an air handler with electric back-up, vastly cheaper than a new gas furnace, offsetting the expensive absorption chiller. A $900 pellet stove would serve as a back-up. Overall, the setup would save an immense amount of electricity and natural gas.
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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.