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Pelamis Wave Power Converter feeding Energy into the grid
More info on this at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelamis_Wave_Energy_Converter .
The company was bought by E.ON and the project was killed. At that time, there were working 450 Kilowatt prototypes (see the video). 450 Kilowatt is a power volume that took wind power plants over three decades (about from 1970 to 2000) to achieve.
The technology was then apparently copied by a Chinese company.
The issue with wave is usually less the maximum capacity and more achieving reliability.
The advantage of waves is that they usually complement the times when wind and solar are available. This reduces both the necessary times of climate-damaging fossil energy backups, and the required capacity for relatively expensive battery storage.
The converters in the video have a nominal capacity of 450 Kilowatt. For an experimental plant at this development stage, this is huge. It took wind power plants over three decades of high-tech development to become larger.
And, yes, maritime technology is not easy, but we already know how to handle a lot of the difficulties - from ships and oil rigs.
The advantage of waves is that they usually complement the times when wind and solar are available.
Maybe I'm dumb, but don't wind and waves usually come at the same time? No wind --> tiny waves
The advantage of waves is that they usually complement the times when wind and solar are available.
Maybe I'm dumb, but don't wind and waves usually come at the same time? No wind --> tiny waves
No. Waves travel trough space and time. Wind causes waves but their origin can be far away, especially if they are larger.
Even looked at the stars? The star light is electromagnetical waves. They travel millions of light years, which means that you look at a state very, very far away, from millions of years ago.
Do you see a ray of lighning? Count. Sound waves travel at about 330 meters per second - that's why you hear the thunder only seconds later.
Go to the beach of a small lake at a quiet day. Throw a stone into it. Observe the waves. They take time to travel through space. And the pattern on the water surface is storing the energy.
(Edit) Now, with a large ocean, it is thousands of kilometers of space, so consequently the travel time from the origin to the point of harvest can be many days.
Bruh, did you seriously compare water waves with light and radio waves?
Just because the name is the same, it doesn't mean the underlying physics are the same too.
Water waves for example are beholden to friction and a persistent gravity, something light and radio waves can mostly ignore (at least on the planetary scale).
The relevant aspects of physics is the same here: Energy moving through time and space. This is an aspect that all mentioned forms of waves - pressure waves, surface gravity waves, and electromagnetic waves do have in common.
You're right that waves and wind don't necessarily overlap, they most often do anyway.
Have you ever been standing at a shore facing a large ocean, like the Scottish Outer Hebrides, Ireland, Bretagne, Portugal, Chile, California, Patagonia or Tasmania ?
And are you aware that wind power plants in the North See im winter sometimes can't be serviced because the friggin waves are too high - over six meters ond more?
The great thing about wave energy that it is the endless ocean surface which both stores the energy, and transports it through space and time.
By this way, the energy can be harvested far away from the time at which the wind was blowing, and far away from the place where it created waves.
As such, wave power is an ideal complement to wind and solar energy, because it can fill up the grid at the times when the latter are lacking - without expensive storage devices, because the storage, which is the ocean surface, is already there.
Following the demise of the company, the P2-001 device, having completed over 15,000 hours of operation, was acquired by Wave Energy Scotland.
That's slightly over 2 years, and it had to be repeatedly taken away for servicing during that time. That's not exactly a roaring success.
It is technology in development. Off-shore wind power also had to solve a lot of difficulties but it is working now.