WAVE ENERGY ELECTRICAL GENERATION IS A REALITY

WAVE ENERGY CONVERTERS ARE IN USE NOW, AND MORE ARE BEING BUILT.  HERE IS THE LATEST:


Image from renewable energy focus .com article by George Marsh dated 14 Feb.2014
Please go to the linked article for a more detailed explanation of how Wave energy converts work.


    Anyone who has ever stood on a beach and listened to the waves lapping the shore is intuitively aware that ocean waves carry considerable kinetic energy. We've long known that about falling water; and the water wheel driven grist mill has been in operation for centuries. More recent is the water driven turbine. However, a mechanism to harness the in and out varying tempo of the moving water of an ocean wave just wasn't as intuitive as the water wheel and the turbine. By the time we seriously turned our attention to the challenge, the piston driven internal combustion engine, converting an up and down motion via a crank shaft to a rotary motion  generating drive to wheels, had been around for more than a century. None the less despite the less than cutting edge image of the piston the idea of harnessing the kinetic energy of the ocean's waves seems pretty Buck Rogers to a lot of us who haven't been following developments in this field regularly. Our purpose in this post however is not to explain the how of the technology but simply to report on the latest application that we recently came across in the pages of WORKBOAT Magazine. We found an explanation of the how it's done part in an article by George Marsh in Renewable Energy Focus .com 

 WORKBOAT  which we always link you to in our news section reported in their March 2018 issue that the Portland Oregon ship yard VIGOR is building a 125' by 59' wave energy converter buoy for Ocean Energy Group and its subsidiary Ocean Energy USA. This latest wave energy converter will be sent to the U.S. Navy's Wave Energy Test Site ("WETS" in "NAVSPEAK") on the windward, and hence wavy side of Oahu. This is a first of its kind for the Navy WETS and is partly funded by the DOE to the total tune (for the whole experiment not just the energy converter buoy) of about $12 million. A little more than half that figure went into just the wave energy converter buoy. Also participating in the project is Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland ("SEAI" in "NAVSPEAK").
Our research reveals that while this is the latest application of the Wave Energy Converter, it is far from the first. We now know how to build these things . It probably happened while we were napping.