Wave farms?

[OneGrassRoot]

I admit, I don't recall hearing about wave farms before today.

I see they've been mentioned at DU a time or two over the last few years, but I'm curious what the view of this is as of today?



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Ministers have approved plans for the world's largest commercial wave farm.

Full consent has been given for a 40MW farm off the north-west coast of Lewis - enough to power nearly 30,000 homes.

Wave energy firm Aquamarine Power said it would begin installing its Oyster devices in the next few years, once grid infrastructure is put in place.

Energy giant SSE said last week it would not be able to commission work on a Western Isles subsea electricity cable before 2017.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-22611317

[cprise]

1. It was almost a hot topic 8-9 years ago

And one farm operated for a little while in 2008:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agu%C3%A7adoura_Wave_Farm

There has been more progress with tidal power than wave power.

[OnlinePoker]

2. Pelamis has carried on with trialing new technology off Scotland

The ScottishPower Renewables (SPR) owned Pelamis P2 wave energy converter has this week completed its first year of a robust testing programme at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Orkney.

The combined P2 test programme has now accumulated 7500 grid connected operating hours, and exported 160MWh of electricity to the national grid. These are encouraging figures for this stage of the testing programme and it is anticipated that generated powers will continue to rise as the programme develops. These P2 operating hours bring the cumulative total for Pelamis technology up to over 10,000 grid connected operating hours, demonstrating both the extensive experience of the Pelamis team and the wealth of learning delivered by the P2 testing programme specifically.

http://www.pelamiswave.com/news/news/134/ScottishPower-Renewables-Pelamis-P2-Machine-Celebrates-One-Year-of-Accelerated-Real-Sea-Testing

[silverweb]

3. Oregon is one state experimenting.

[font color="navy" face="Verdana"]Just because there haven't been headlines, doesn't mean the work isn't ongoing.

http://rnp.org/node/wave-tidal-energy-technology

[OneGrassRoot]

4. Thanks for the links and info above.

Much appreciated.

[Socialistlemur]

5. This approach isn't practical...too expensive to operate

All of these gadgets attempting to use wave power will run into huge operating expenses. This will render them uneconomic. We have seen efforts for many years, and we will probably read enthusiastic reports by non professionals. But I'd sit and wait patiently for a commercial development...it won't happen. If these guys go ahead they'll bilk the stockholders and they will not return their loans. In a sense it's like the Chunnel, good on paper but a commercial failure. These tons tend to fail because we do not appreciate the power of the sea.

A much saner approach for these areas would be to consider construction of very sound barriers to use tidal power. But this requires a lot of concrete, and it's not something gadget makers can use to swindle stock buyers.