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.

Slowing down the earth/moon

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, this energy doesn't come free ... I suspect that the result of extracting energy from the tides would be a very slight slowing of the Earth's rotation, or the slowing of the rotation of the moon around the Earth. Conservation of momentum/energy.

Probably a very, very small effect though.

Of course, I'm talking out of my ass now. Anyone care to do the math and figure out how much energy we would have to extract / how long it would take before we started noticing any change?

What I want to know is

[dfenstrate]

How do these things interact with sea life? Often, various species of fish and invertabrate type creates cling to relatively stationary type things in the ocean- often intentional, such as when an obsolete ship is sunk for an artificial reef.

So if sea life starts to make a home out of these things, will it interfere with their operation? I could probably figure it out from their PDF's but I've left work and my brain has shut down for the day.

Hey, Alternative Power - Cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

No oil company bashing from this AC. However, unless this power generation technique is competitive with burning petroleum at about US$33 per barrel, it won't be practical in the long run. The same thing applies to any energy generation, recovery or conservation scheme.

This is because the petroleum supply curve has a bend in it, and that bend implies huge surpluses above a certain breakpoint, which in 2002 is about $33 per barrel.

The bend is there because of the natural distribution of oil deposits - they're lognormally distributed with respect to energy content. This phenomenon applies to the supply curves for all minerals deposited by sedimentary processes, BTW.

Re:Windtraps

[morbid]

They built one just such contraptions in Scotland back in the late 80's/early 90's but the steel was too thin, and they towed it out to sea in rough weather. The machine broke :-( Too bad, because it was a brilliant idea. The world is full of such brilliant ideas, and they're relatively cheap to make but no one wants to pay for them. If I had a million dollars I'd (fix the tree fort in our yard) fund one or two of these experiments. Alas, I'm poor.
...but not a real green dress, that's cruel.

Another Wave-energy project

[Heerscher]

This isn't the only wave-energy project currently in development. There's also a project by a Dutch company (AWS BV.), called the Archimedes Wave Swing. Their 6MW pilot plant is to be tested from April onwards in Portugal. It's a really interesting concept, using the law of Archimedes to generate power.

You can find it at http://www.waveswing.com [waveswing.com]

Tidal power and desalinization

[lkaos]

I had heard something about this on NPR. I do not believe they indeed on trying to use the power to power homes and such, but instead, to run a desalinization plant to provide freshwater to remote places.

It becomes cost effective because it would be overly expensive to provide power out to these remote areas which desparately need fresh water. It supposedly opens up a whole bunch of land to agriculture that was unusable before.

I remember hearing about this being done before for some third world country but it failing miserably because of storms and such.

Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to find much info on google so I could be mistaken.

You think you're kidding,

[switcha]

but you're not far off. At the Crystal Ballroom [mcmenamins.com] in Portland, OR, they have a floor on a suspension system [mcmenamins.com]. The whole thing moves under your feet a little. If you could harness it, you could probably generate just enough electricity to pump out the cigarette nimbus clouds that accumulate during concerts.

Re:Slowing down the earth/moon

[happyclam]

Funny... Galileo, among the first to truly understand and explain many things in the world, wrongly used the tides as "proof" of the movement of the Earth, particularly its diurnal rotation. His theory was that the oceans "sloshed" because of the earth's spinning motion. Of course, we know that's not true: the tides are caused by the moon's gravitational pull as it travels around the Earth.

The ocean's sloshing action has no more effect on the Earth's rotation or the moon's orbit than water sloshing in a glass on a train affects the speed or direction of said train.

Extracting energy from the tides will no more affect the earth's spinning than putting up windmills to extract energy from the wind does.

Re:Slowing down the earth/moon

[AmishSlayer]

The ocean's sloshing action has no more effect on the Earth's rotation or the moon's orbit than water sloshing in a glass on a train affects the speed or direction of said train.

Extracting energy from the tides will no more affect the earth's spinning than putting up windmills to extract energy from the wind does.

It just depends on how much energy you subtract from the system. You can make a effect apparent, but I will admit that it may not be likely. Since the oceans do effect the rotation of the earth:

http://www.iit.edu/~johnsonp/smart00/lesson4.htm #t idefaqs
http://www.itss.raytheon.com/cafe/qadir/q 1691.html

then subtracting energy from the oceans *may* have an noticable effect *if* the energy is great enough. Even if it is not enough energy there will still be an effect (just not detectable by our instruments)

Argh! Something's wrong with this...

[BierGuzzl]

1 square mile of COASTAL ocean to harness enough energy to power only 22,000 homes? What kind of environmental price is this? And why is the BC gov't buying it? I'm really confused on this one -- especially since Blue Energy [bluenergy.com] has been in operation here for years and has not been able to secure such a contract with a more powerful and environmentally responsible davis turbine setup to harness the ocean's currents which are very strong and predictable. As an added bonus, these systems can at the same time serve as a floating bridge. One such proposal has been made for the San Fransisco Bay. Check this stuff out!! (no I don't work for them, and don't have any financial interest there)

Cool! Surfs up!

[WillSeattle]

Love the idea. On a practical level, we could power the entire world just from tidal energy - or even from the wind energy in the Western US or from the wind energy in the MidWest.

While the tidal generator might not be proven, we know we can implement wind energy today. In fact, the whole Western US/Canada energy crisis caused us to build more alternative energy in the US/Canada in the last year than we had built in the entire previous century.

A diversified energy supply would do us good - and locally-produced energy supplies are always better than energy from other sources. The more different sources we have, the less vulnerable to price fluctuations, the less vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

Maybe I should pick up a board for use here in Seattle, huh? Got one in Santa Barbara CA and one in Mount Pleasant SC - might be fun to ride the pipe on the West Coast up in BC - heard the waves there are among the best in the world.

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