Alternative Energy: Power Via Coastal Wave Motion.

lavalamp writes "Scottish company Ocean Power Delivery has developed a sectional-torpedo-looking-thing as a means to transform the raw fury of the sea into electricity! I'm curious to see what happens when another drunk Exxon captain plows into a field of these things. They just secured a 8.6m (usd) in funding to continue research and build a large scale prototype." The company has won a contract to produce a 750kw "plant" off of the scottish coast and has an mou to produce a 2Mw project off of the coast of Vancouver Island in Canada. While this is far from being free energy, it is a pretty interesting way of deriving power from the tides. A side benefit is that surfers will finally be able to rail like their boarding cousins.

Windtraps

[Adnans]

When will those Dune windtraps become reality??

Seriously, power generation via wave is old news.

Check out this [murdoch.edu.au] site for some backgrounds.

-adnans

Railing on a surfboard

[Silver222]

Would be kinda destructive. They aren't the strongest things in the world. You can abuse a snowboard or skateboard a lot more than a surfboard. Hell, they get pressure dents in the deck just from your feet.

I'd hate to skip over one of those things with a surfboard...you'd rip the fins right off, best case. Worse case you'd end up with a trashed board.

Already being done..

[TwoStep]

Something similar is already being done in Canada, in the Bay of Fundy. They have a massive tidal power plant there.

I think the tides are over 20 feet there, which I guess is the reason there aren't similar plants elsewhere.

Twostep

Re:Beware! ...it's not tidal power. Just dampening

[sanermind]

Nope. That was using -tidal- power, [where you capture the high tide and then drain it for kinetic energy]. This is different, it is dampening the energy out of waves caused by wind. Of course, this could ultimately affect climate if done in open ocean or something, but generally I imagine it would be done for waves that would otherwise crash to shore. So, if anything, it will just reduce the rate of erosion, [and piss os surfers].

Re:Woo hoo!

[spike hay]

This won't solve our energy problems. It will help some though. It is only worth putting tidal plants in areas with large differences between high and low tide. These places are few and far between. Even when they do put plants in these places, they only produce a fraction of the power of a convetional plant.

To really solve the energy crisis w/o polluting, we need to build more nuclear power plants.

It's not so bad as people think. It doesn't pollute like coal. It's not expensive like natural gas. (which, BTW, also pollutes)

Coal pollutes too much. We'd be overrun with smog, much more so than if we used gasoline engines. We don't have enough oil to be energy independant. Natural gas is too expensive and we will run out of it in about 30 years. That leaves us with nuclear. Nuclear power is not as dangerous as people think. Also, a Chernobyl-scale meltdowns in U.S. PWR are impossible. The Chernobyl reactor was a crappy commie RBMK reactor with no containment building. Of course we had the TMI reactor problem. However, that killed or injured no one. And, according to the World Health Org, only 31 people were killed in Chernobyl.

Fears of nuclear power are overblown. Radiation is just like any other pollutant. And you need a shyteload of radiation to really harm you. Nuclear power has killed a grand total of 35-50 people in it's entire exsistence. Coal power has killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 million people.

Little known fact, but according to the Lawrence Livermore Nat'l lab, coal power realeases more radiation than nuclear power. Coal naturally contains some thorium and uranium. When you burn coal, this is realesed into the air. We burn so much fscking coal that we realease around 150 thousand tons of uranium and 350 thousand tons of thorium into the atmosphere!!! The study is here [ornl.gov]. Nuclear power is also cheap. With some new tech, they have gotten the cost of some nuclear power plants below the cost of coal.

There is not mountains of nuclear waste made by our plants. Each plant only uses several tons pounds of uranium a year. That would fit in an area just a few feet square. The total amount of waste ever created for a whole family for their whole lives would fit in a shoebox. If we reprocessed our fuel, it would fit in a pill bottle. Compare that to mountains of highly toxic coal waste with arsenic, cyanide, and other good stuff that just sits on the ground and leaches poisons into the groundwater.

Nuclear waste storage is very good. It's not like they are hauling it around in thin metal barrels like the environmentalists want you to think. No. The waste is transported in thick metal containers that have been tested by being thrown off cliffs, rammed into locomotives, and all sorts of crap. In Yucca mountain, the waste is stored inside these metal casks, which are in turn inside an ultra-thick concrete subterrainean room. Also, the storage place is 1,000 feet above the water table, so you're OK there.

Re:Slowing down the earth/moon

[elfdump]

Most tides are caused by the earth being attracted to the moon (The sun exerts some tides, but they are negligible). When the moon approaches the earth more closely in its orbit, and as the earth itself rotates, the distance between the two bodies changes and hence the land and especially the water rise or fall. Thus, while tides are a side effect of planetary motion, the force of the tides itself arises from the mass and distance of the moon, and not from the moon's motion around the earth. So harnessing the tides won't affect the earth's rotation, or the orbit of the moon. You may be confused with the "slingshot" technique, whereby spaceships are swung around a planet in order to bank off their natural rotation, which does indeed slow the rotation of the planet slightly.

Re:Slowing down the earth/moon

[AmishSlayer]

It might not slow down the Earth and here's why... the oceans slow down the Earth by about 1/1000th of a second every year. If the energy is being taken from the ocean the tidal force *might* be reduced because the energy will be rerouted to my laptop. If the ocean has less energy then the force applied againts the earth should be less and it might speed up. Then we'll have to change the saying to 23:59/7

Wavebreaker the danish way

[Miklos]

Back in the early 90s the danish inventor, Erik Skaarup, invented the wavebreaker and the design has been proven to work at an irish university.

It has (according to the studies) somewhat better effectiveness than the one mentioned in this article.

Read more here:

http://www.waveplane.com/indexuk.htm

- Miklos

* good judgement comes from experience - experience comes from bad judgement *

Microsoft doesn't have death squads.

[dotderf]

Exxon-Mobil and some other companies have hired security forces to protect their natural gas operations. Behold, these security forces have killed thousands of people. Can Microsoft do that?

Exxon was coerced into it (torture, murder, rape of employees), and I don't want to say "Exxon kills people," but Exxon did give these people money.

Tides != Waves

[PhotoGuy]

While this is far from being free energy, it is a pretty interesting way of deriving power from the tides.

Actually, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think tides and waves are quite distinct. Waves are caused by wind across water (which is why they can vary greatly), while tides are caused by the pull of lunar gravity (and are very predictable). Tide tables are published years in advance, wave forecast are part of the daily weather forecast.

The unit described makes use of the height difference across waves, and has nothing to do with tides, from what I can see.

In the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, there is a small tidal power plan (experimental, I think). Basically as the tidal water flows in and flows out due to the big change in tides (highest in the world), power is generated.

It seems to me that there is more potential (so to speak :-) in tidal energy, as the energy in moving massive amounts of relatively heavy water up and down six feet (or 20 in the case of the bay of Fundy) would be enormous.

Of course, the construction costs to harness it, might be more than proportionately higher.

It seems to me, one big advantage to the tides is that they're 100% reliable, whereas wave action (like wind, and solar) will vary based upon weather.

-me

Re:What I want to know is

[ackthpt]

Well, there's been a project like that in the Thames River near London, if it's still there, for a couple decades. I don't know what it's called, but this is hardly a new idea. Here's one site on the subject. [wavegen.co.uk]

Already been done, and can produce up to 240 MW

[fifirebel]

Check out: http://membres.lycos.fr/larance/main1.html (french) [lycos.fr], http://www.edf.fr/html/fr/decouvertes/voyage/usine /usine_d.html (french) [www.edf.fr] or http://www.edf.fr/html/en/decouvertes/voyage/usine /retour-usine.html (english) [www.edf.fr].

The 240 MW figure comes from this page [www.edf.fr]: the power plant contains 24 groups, eeach group able to ouput 10 MW.

Nuclear? Another victim of advertising

[Mandelbrute]

The Chernobyl reactor was a crappy commie RBMK reactor with no containment building

After the steam explosion there was no roof remaining in the containment building.

Little known fact, but according to the Lawrence Livermore Nat'l lab, coal power realeases more radiation than nuclear power

Here we go again - the advertising of the AEC has won another convert. Here's how you get numbers like those:

First, you consider a new, well run nuclear power plant with on site storage of all radioactive materials. The radiation output of such a plant should be zero. Then you measure the entire world consumption of coal, work out how much radioactive material there would be on average in all of that coal, and you get a large number. Compare the ratio of the two and you get an infinite amount. Everyone would probably agree that this is a very silly way to do a comparison.

So why is the coal radioactive? Sedimentary rock is made up of other rock that has been ground down, and then laid down as sediment - you have a wide mix of minerals in such rock. As a consequence, if you consider a large amount of any sedimentary rock you will find some radioactive material present - this is one of the sources of natural background radiation. So, if you go a step furthur, and consider VAST amounts of coal, oil or even foodstuffs, you will find large amounts of radioactive material. The difference between the radioactivity in a childs sandpit, an ash storage dam at a coal fired power plant and the lowest grade of nuclear waste to merit special storage is that of concentration of radioactive material. It would probably be extemely difficult to distingish the radioactivity in an ash heap from the background radiation.

we realease around 150 thousand tons of uranium and 350 thousand tons of thorium into the atmosphere

Now the odd thing about heavy metals that people tend to forget, is that they are heavy. The cheapest form of anti-pollution equipment in a power station is to let the solid particles fall out by gravity - if you look at fifty year old plants they have at least that in place. The major material that is trapped in this process is silicon dioxide, and usually the aim is to trap extremely fine (sub-micron sized) particles of silicon dioxide. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to calculate the size of a uranium oxide particle that would weigh the same as a micron sized silicon dioxide particle - but I can tell you that it is very unlikely to get such a small chunk of material without trying very hard to get it.

In short - if gravity seperation catches the light stuff it also gets the heavy stuff.

Nuclear power is also cheap

The situation with British Nuclear Fuels argues the opposite. I can't recall the exact number of hundreds of billions of pounds sterling they recently announced that they had lost - but a quick google search should tell. All of those rare earths used in the equipmnet are not cheap - plus none of the radiation resistant steels or iron based superalloys are cheap.

With some new tech, they have gotten the cost of some nuclear power plants below the cost of coal.

I think you will find that this should read "with a new government subsity." Anyone can make a profit if an outside source keeps shovelling in money.

Each plant only uses several tons pounds of uranium a year. That would fit in an area just a few feet square.

Therin lies the problem - a concentrated source of radioactivity. Comparing this to a beach full of sand or a hundred ash heaps is missing the point.

Nuclear waste storage is very good.

A google search will turn up dozens of incidents where the clueless have done silly things with nuclear waste - things like poorly trained staff stacking all of the drums very close together - so that everything gets nice and hot, and kids finding highly radioactive material form the USA in a dump in Mexico. It's the idiots that say "it's clean" that cause perception problems. We have the stuff, and use the stuff, but we should never pretend that it's clean.

Re:Excellent News

[Cally]

it's excellent to hear that some medium scale implementations are going though.

After years of low funding and inertia, alternative energy is really taking off in the UK. I can choose to take all my domestic electricity from wind power if I want [greenpeace.org.uk] just by ticking a box on the quarterly bill - it costs the same (to me at any rate, presumably the genco's will be making bigger profits once the capital outlaw is covered, than from fossil fuel generators which need constant money shovelled into them.) We're also building several large [offshorewindfarms.co.uk] offshore windfarms [powergenrenewables.com], one off the scottish coast, one off Norfolk (eastern English coast.) Looks like we'll clean up when the Middle East goes up in smoke and the price of oil quadruples on the international spot market. I'm glad I've got stock in Ballard [ballard.com] fuel-cell manufacturers, too. Lots of people were calling me names on the Larsen break-up story I submitted the other day - well I might be a lily-livered pinko commie shirt-lifting museli muncher, who wears sandals, but at least I'll be rich =)