WaveNET – the Floating, Flexible Wave Energy Generator

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @06:15AM from the making-bernoulli-work-for-us dept.

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.

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Re:Saltwater and MTBF by Spy+Handler · 2014-11-26 07:19 · Score: 3, Funny

Stop trying to be so nice and polite. What you really meant to say is that this aint ever gonna work because salt water is a crazy fucked up environment. Harebrained schemes like this always fail because seawater is so corrosive that maintenance costs will eat up any and all profits.
Haven't seen anyone mention it yet, but only a couple months ago there was a Slashdot story about another wave power generation scheme that failed. Cause? Salt water and high maintenance costs.