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WaveNET – the Floating, Flexible Wave Energy Generator
Zothecula writes: Scotland's Albatern is putting a new, modular spin on renewable energy generation. WaveNET is a scalable array of floating "Squid" generator units that harvest wave energy as their buoyant arms rise and fall with the motion of the waves. Each Squid can link up to as many as three others, effectively creating a large, floating grid that's flexible in every direction. The bigger this grid gets, the more efficient it becomes at harvesting energy, and the more different wave movements it can extract energy from. Albatern's 10-year target is to have 1.25 kilometer-long floating energy farms pumping out as much as 100 megawatts by 2024.
Median energy density in waves is too low in most places. You need way too large machines to extract useful amounts of power. The few times you get sufficiently powerful waves they tend to rip your equipment to bits.
Wave energy is one of those ideas which seem really obvious from a distance, so the fact that project after project fails does not seem to dissuade anyone. They were obviously just doing it wrong.
I really hope that I am wrong and this turns out to be a great success, but I am not holding my breath.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I wish them the best of luck but saltwater is particularly nasty stuff over over an extended period of time. Hopefully they can find a cheap way to insulate against it.
energy is mass times velocity squared. Energy flux flowing over a windmill has another velocity, so velocity cubed.
This is one of the more novel designs I've seen. It seems to be scaled to a good size for wave action near the coastline, it's modular and extensible, and it looks like it would allow for small vessels to navigate over the grid, as long as their draft depth is shallow enough. Another advantage is that it doesn't "ruin the skyline" the way a wind farm might do in Massachusetts.Also, the ocean is more "reliable" as an energy source than wind or solar... this method ought to deliver a more "reliable" 24/7 output.
Sounds like a pretty good deal for certain areas, and I bet those areas will start installing this system (or something like it) in the next few years.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Agree with you both about two things
1. Powerful wave movements can rip equipments apart
2. Salt water is such a damaging factor to the equipments
So my thought is that not only a power farm is located in a mild whether area... but also weather forecast data should be used to relocate the farm over an enormous area of ocean surface to avoid damage to equipment... and yet that area is still inside the national territory waters of any particular country... Otherwise they'd have to find a way to protect their investments in international waters.
To get over the damaging nature of salt water... I guess the main materials used to create the farm arms have to be plastic-like... Any metal is such a suicidal design.... particularly iron.
Won't something think of the Moon?!
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Wave energy is one of those ideas which seem really obvious from a distance, so the fact that project after project fails does not seem to dissuade anyone. They were obviously just doing it wrong.
Do you know how many rockets were unsuccessfully fired before we finally got one safely into space? Do you know how many airplanes were lost before we managed to make flight safe? How many boats were lost crossing the oceans?
Just because we haven't figured it out yet doesn't mean we won't. Only way to crack the problem is to try.
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I don't get it. Slashdot used to run on some Pentium tower in the Geek Compound.
Now, they need banner ads, _plus_ slashdot deals, _plus_ sponsored stories at the bottom.
All this, plus they get a lot more traffic now.
So where's the money going? Obviously the salaries of the people who run the place are higher than the approx.. $0 that Taco et al earned back in the day.
But with the higher traffic, why aren't the banner ads alone enough to run a site with, by modern standards, fairly minimal traffic?
SoylentNews has about 1/5 the traffic of slashdot, and they run on peanuts - a few thousand.
Does Slashdot really need Deals to run? Or is it just an attempt by Dice to get more profit?
Might we all - dice, slashdot editors, and slashdot readers - be better off if slashdot went back to being a community-run site? Put it in the hands of the current editors (who aren't that bad, really), have banner ads, and see how it goes. Dice can stop trying to get blood from a stone, and everyone else can have a more relaxed, symbiotic relationship.
How does that sound? What do you think, Timothy?
The alternative to this is one that resides on the ground and it generates the same power no matter what the height of the waves are. That's a lot more logical.
Why don't they build giant wave energy generators on the ocean floor at the coastline instead of on top of the water?
You can't take energy from a system without affecting the system. A massive wave-energy generator *will* have detrimental effects on the ocean. It's inevitable.
The modular design is cool. It's going to come in handy ...
This wont work...
Here's the key piece of their mechanism:
http://images.gizmag.com/galle...
It's 25 meters beneath the north sea... in the midst of a spiderweb of steel...
That joint is most likely to fail during a storm.
When it does fail, you'd now have a floating buoy dangling a giant steel beam beneath it, riding storm waves...
and crashing into the rest of the network.
Storm conditions will prevent you from doing anything about it until the damage is done.
This may be so but we (the British Isles) are a group of islands in the Atlantic, we get waves rolling around our coastline 24/7, coming in a long way across open ocean, and we've got a lot of sea. We're a relatively small island and people get protective about windfarms getting built on land. So it's a reliable source of energy to explore in a place not many folk mind too much having installations on, definitely worth researching scaleable solutions here.
These things remove energy from the water by reducing churn at the surface. This churn is critical for oxygenation and purification of the water. Have they bothered to study the impact on the habitat of near-surface sea wildlife?
Stealing an infinitesimally small portion of the oceans energy to reign in our MASSIVE dumping of CO2, methane, mercury, lead & other compounds into the atmosphere is a small price to pay. Its not perfect to be sure, but its far better than the status quo.
... people get protective about windfarms getting built on land
The problem sometimes is that the people from the location are all for it but NIMBYs are brought in specially.
I Come from further north than Aberdeen. In Orkney, we have had wind turbines for decades but various people would come from central or southern England and try to drum up opposition. I once had some on my (parents) doorstep. They told me about the harm that these things would do to me and how noisy they were. I declined and they moved on. I don't remember a single friend or relative who was interested in their stories.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.