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Power

Wave Power Fails To Live Up To Promise 198

Posted by Soulskill from the water-under-the-bridge dept.
the_newsbeagle writes: One of the leading companies developing wave power devices, Ocean Power Technologies, has dramatically scaled down its ambitions. The company had planned to install the world's first commercial-scale wave farms off the coast of Australia and Oregon, but has now announced that it's ending those projects. Instead it will focus on developing next-gen devices. Apparently the economics of wave power just don't make sense yet.
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Wave Power Fails To Live Up To Promise More

Wave Power Fails To Live Up To Promise

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  • Nelson says: (Score:4, Funny)

    by I'm New Around Here ( 1154723 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @12:48PM (#47929391)

    Ha! Ha!

  • Golden opportunity missed... (Score:5, Funny)

    by TiggertheMad ( 556308 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @12:50PM (#47929421) Journal
    "A spokesperson for Ocean Power Technologies announced, that after a number of years of testing and development efforts, that Wave farms are a wash."

    *ducks* *runs*

    • The whole business model smells fishy.

      • Re:Golden opportunity missed... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @11:41PM (#47934137)

        Yeah, they were proposing and building these giant 140ft by 40ft monstrosities that would have been disruptive to fishing and wildlife, and totally incompatible with the expectations of the community. Oregonians support wave power, but it needs to be slender buoys that are more like artificial kelp; something that creates artificial habitat, not something large and industrial that pushes nature out of the way.

        There are actually a bunch of other pilot projects, some of which are more likely to move forwards.

        Also keep in mind, they only had approval for the pilot project to test the feasibility. Nobody promised any permits for the large scale project. The pilot would have had to prove not only that it generated power, but also that it didn't interfere with wildlife or fishing. And it wasn't designed to meet the actual standards it would have needed to meet. Probably they thought they could bribe their way through, found out that doesn't work here, and are winding it down and blaming efficiency delays.

        And, it turns out they don't have funding anyways, so they can't really move the project.

        They admit in their press release that other companies have more mature products not only on the market, but proven.

    • Re:Golden opportunity missed... (Score:5, Funny)

      by slinches ( 1540051 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @01:25PM (#47929795)

      Oh, darn. We must be on different wavelengths. Last I heard, they were doing swell.

      I guess these sorts of things just ebb and flow with the economic tides.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Citizen of Earth ( 569446 )
      This project was very successful, considering that the central purpose of all alternative-energy projects is to extract government subsidies. Any other outcome is coincidental.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mpe ( 36238 )
        This project was very successful, considering that the central purpose of all alternative-energy projects is to extract government subsidies.

        Is that "alternative-energy" or "alternative to energy".

      • So you don't think anything is worth trying unless you can tell ahead of time if it's going to work or not? There's a lot of energy to be extracted from waves if we can figure out how to harness them.

    • *ducks* *runs*

      So that's Salter Ducks, obviously intentional..., but then what is the runs ?

  • Lots of problems with it (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @12:52PM (#47929445) Homepage
    But I can easily see a small scale usage for it.

    Primary examples would be installed on sea installations, like say oil drilling platforms. Why ship in fuel to an oil drilling platform, when you can simply install a wavepower generator to provide the power. Then, once you find oil, you don't have to get rid of the wave power generator. Keep it and use wave power to get the oil, rather than burning oil just to get more oil.

    Also, I could easily see a small scale wave power generator designed for boats, particularly house boats.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by galabar ( 518411 )
      This all depends on what they were able to engineer. It may be the case that none of those things are possible with the current generation of device, with the benefits still remaining theoretical.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by TWX ( 665546 )
      How about just using the natural gas pressure and burnoff to generate power as opposed to simply lighting it off as an open flame?

      I'm all in favor of using noncombustible means to produce energy, but I'm also happy to go for the low-hanging fruit. If oil wells and other fossil-fuel recovery operations can use a byproduct of their main purpose, just use that instead.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tomhath ( 637240 )
      It would work intermittently, like wind and solar, so you still need a full size backup generator. Then you have to wonder if the double cost is worth it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by skids ( 119237 )

        Wave energy is actually known as one of the less intermittent renewable resources. There is seasonal variation, but at certain sites there are pretty much always waves and it can be used as a baseline power source. The only things more reliable are tidal and geothermal.

    • Wave generators rely on bolting something down to the seafloor for stability and using the wave energy to push something back and forth. On a deep ocean drilling platform, you typically won't have the organized wave activity found on the coast where the slope of the seafloor guides the waves.

      You still have the current (in some places)which could be used to drive a turbine but the big problem is that the energy density isn't all that high. That means you have to capture a wide area of wave or current. Whi

      • I would suggest an offshore power backbone, tied to wave/wind/solar, and back that up with natural gas. With gas turbines, you don't need to have power 100% of the time, and the renewable energy averages out anyhow.

  • When doing anything involving the ocean (Score:4, Interesting)

    by geekoid ( 135745 ) <{moc.oohay} {ta} {dnaltropnidad}> on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @12:55PM (#47929493) Homepage Journal

    Take you expected costs, double it, then throw the piece of paper way because it's still useless.

    • Re:When doing anything involving the ocean (Score:5, Informative)

      by MightyYar ( 622222 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @01:19PM (#47929709)

      People who have never worked in a marine environment just don't understand this. Seawater is nasty, nasty stuff to anything. Plastic, metal, wood - it doesn't matter. Add a mechanical part and it just becomes a nightmare. The navy, for instance, is continuously painting their ships. As in, they never stop painting them. If you have an offshore wind farm, offshore wave farm, or whatever - you will spend far more on maintenance than you ever do on capital costs. And you have to restrict the technology to proven, overbuilt, and simple. Even titanium will fail in salt water (hydrogen embrittlement)... not a nice place to engineer for.

      • Re:When doing anything involving the ocean (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Jane Q. Public ( 1010737 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @01:40PM (#47929969)
        When I was a child, we had a nice wood boat. A ChrisCraft. The finish was getting pretty weather-worn so my father took it to a guy who refinished boats to get it done. He specified brass screws, just like the original. The refinisher said, "Everybody uses stainless steel these days. They're just as good." My father reluctantly let him use the stainless steel screws.

        The boat was moored by strong chains to a dock in the ocean. (You had to leave lots of play in the chains so the boat could ride up and down with the tide.) A few weeks later, by family got a call from the SeaBees. They had found the boat, dangling underwater by the chains holding it to the dock pilings.

        The seawater had eaten the stainless steel screws right up. It only took a few weeks.
      • Water. AKA - "The universal solvent". I personally think wind farms are economically viable in many places, but not so much offshore for precisely the reasons you mention.

  • Oregon... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Nerrd ( 1094283 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @01:01PM (#47929533)
    Part of the problem might be that they can't sell the power. The wind farms we currently have are already producing more power than the bonneville power administration is willing to purchase - even though they are under contract to do so.

    • Then convert the wind power into hydrogen, for longer term storage, when wind is not available. Yeah, it isn't very efficient, but it is better than wasting it on feeding the grid that doesn't need it.

    • What they should do is use the ocean version of "pumped storage": build a giant vertical cylinder in the ocean, and when you have surplus electricity you pump water OUT of the chamber. Then when usage peaks and you need more electricity, you let water run back in and turn turbines to generate it.

      It's probably a hell of a lot cheaper than batteries. Pumped storage has been an up-and-coming technology for 20 years now. I worked on one project in which they hollowed out an entire stone mountain, creating hu

      • Hmm, I don't know.

        Suppose you build a tube (radius = 100 m) out of concrete where the water is 200 m deep. If I'm not mistaken you could then store up to this http://www.wolframalpha.com/in... [wolframalpha.com] much energy in watt-hours. That's not a lot in the big scheme of things. To store one terrawatt-hour you would need a tube that's 2.5 km in radius, or lots and lots of smaller tubes.

        Unless I messed up my high school level physics calculation there.

  • sorry (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Charliemopps ( 1157495 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @01:05PM (#47929585)

    Moving parts = bad idea.
    Moving parts in salt water?
    Repairs under water?!?!
    It's as simple as that.

    • Don't most ships these days have propellers?

      • Ships can be taken out of the water.
        Propellers are not moving parts. They are fixed, to a shaft that enters the dry part of the boat through a series of bushings. The "Mechanism" is inside the boat.

        These wave capture devices are complex folding structures that are entirely under water. Even something as simple as a hing is going to fail in short order under water. Ever had a fish tank? Even freshwater tanks have to have their pumps constantly cleaned and maintained. It's fact. Moving parts in salt water is

        • I wonder: alternating neodynium magnets and ferrous enhanced coils, with air gaps between. As the wave comes through, and changes the interveningcore material (Air/salt-water), I'd expect a current in the coils.

          probably not practical.

          Option 2: porcelain and plastic rockers, with magnetics inside.

          Option 3: a float, a unidirectional clutch (like a bike), a drive belt, and a shaft to an unexposed generator.

          I think there have been some good wave generators out there (IIRC, Scotland comes to mind). I'm inclined

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megol ( 3135005 )

      WTF... You aren't an engineer that's for sure.

  • Mechanical stresses ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @01:17PM (#47929697) Homepage

    I seem to recall a news story [www.cbc.ca] from a few years ago where they'd tried to put wave power in the Bay of Fundy, where the highest tides in the world are.

    OpenHydro -- the Irish company which installed the world's first 1-megawatt tidal turbine in the Bay of Fundy -- and its partner Nova Scotia Power deployed the 10-tonne turbine on the floor of the Minas Passage in November 2009.

    Then just 20 days later, all 12 turbine rotor blades were destroyed by tidal flows that were two and a half times stronger than for what the turbine was designed.

    Basically, the tides destroyed the machinery in three weeks or so.

    So, yes, there's plenty of mechanical energy to harvest. The problem is that it might also be stronger than the stuff you've built.

  • It's a shame that the idea is not feasible. There is an awesome amount of energy that could be tapped from the ocean.

    • Re:Too bad (Score:4, Interesting)

      by bluefoxlucid ( 723572 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @01:57PM (#47930171) Homepage Journal

      Ocean warming is a bigger opportunity. Jabbing a thermal collector into a volcanic vent, rolling it through a sterling engine as a cooling system, with the cold side submerged in the cold ocean.

      A lot of new, green tech is ludicrous. People want solar farms in the desert because of all the arid heat and lack of clouds, but discount the fragile ecosystem. Wind farms take up much more space than nuclear plants for the same power output. Hydrogen is difficult to store without supercooling, and is only a storage scheme and not a generation scheme, and only operates at 50%-80% efficiency. Hydroelectric is an environmental disaster.

      Direct heat applications from solar-thermal water heating are about the only thing that make sense. Their efficiency is high, and their cost is low. A small, 1.2 square meter collector provides 3000BTU/hr, about 85% of a kW; I can fit over 20 of these on my roof at a sun-receiving angle and spacing, giving over 65,000 BTU/hr average throughout the day. My roof can produce 19kW of heat output, while I only need 3kW to stay warm or cool--the AC breaker is 30A, providing about 3kW of cooling.

      A hydronic coil off the water heater, an absorption cooler, or so on can harvest the heat collected by less than $2000 of tubes and a total of $3000 of equipment to provide for about $2500 annual air space and water heating and cooling in my house. Excess generated heat could theoretically drive a sterling engine to produce a small amount of electricity, but the investment for more tubes to generate a useful amount of electricity would be unjustifiable; I can buy 100% solar electricity for 12 cents per kWh.

      Thus, in just over a year, I can recover my investment in solar water heating by incorporating space heating and cooling, assuming I was in the market for a new furnace and air conditioner anyway--the furnace would be an air handler with electric back-up, vastly cheaper than a new gas furnace, offsetting the expensive absorption chiller. A $900 pellet stove would serve as a back-up. Overall, the setup would save an immense amount of electricity and natural gas.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by skids ( 119237 )

        The solar water heating vendors spent decades charging "what the market would bear" instead of competitively expanding/economizing. At this rate a heat pump and a solar panel may economically pass them up before they can.

  • Had they been successful, they would have slingshotted the moon further away from us. Oh, the calamity!

  • BUILDING IN OCEANS EXPENSIVE

    But seriously, this has always been the case. It costs you ten to a thousand times the amount to build something in the sea than it does on land (depending on depth) and then there's the human cost of maintaining it.

    I'm certainly not saying it's impossible or undesirable, it just hasn't reached the point where technology and our abilities make it worth doing yet. And this isn't a chicken vs egg issue. Even without building tidal turbine systems, people are still doing underwater

  • What promise? No-one promised me anything.

    Technology in it's infancy fails to wipe the floor with technologies that have had literally $Trillions of investment. Not really surprising.

  • Sorry folks, we peed away all your cash and government incentives and it is too expensive to actually produce anything ....so please invest more so that we can do more R&D
  • Why aren't those low prices passed on to consumers? The wholesale cost of electricity has dropped 50%, but our rates have not....

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jonwil ( 467024 )

      Blame the high cost of maintaining (and upgrading) the poles and wires used to get the electricity from where its generated to where its used. (and the need to engineer that infrastructure to handle the highest possible forecast demand)

  • If the economics of oil is in the way, then stop subsidizing oil production with tax breaks and two-trillion dollar wars of oil field conquest. Tax the shit out of them. Alt energy has to make a profit in the shadow of trillions of dollars propping up the oil infrastructure - taxpayer funded. They work in a "free" market while oil companies have marines guarding their wells.

  • Apparently the economics of wave power. (Score:3)

    by MrKaos ( 858439 ) on Wednesday September 17, 2014 @05:51PM (#47932407) Journal
    OR the conservative Australian government has been busy undermining the investments that fund their R&D. The conservative governments in Australia have a long history of undermining future investments and gear their election promises to the older generation of baby boomers.

    They have rapidly turned Australia from leaders in renewable energy to followers.

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