Development
Limited
The Opportunity
Ocean waves have tempted inventors as an inexhaustible source of energy for many years. Now the swells generated by the trade winds expend their millions of megawatts of energy on the shore. A simple and effective means of harvesting this energy would provide pollution-free power with no fuel costs. Once wave energy can be harvested, it will surpass solar and wind as a renewable energy source. There is far more energy in the waves than in wind and sun, and the waves produce useable amounts of energy more than 60% of the time, compared to 30 – 40% for wind and sun.
The challenge has been considerable. Storms are destructive and seawater is corrosive. Attempts to extract this energy have failed repeatedly. The Osprey, an 800 ton, multi-million-dollar wave generator sank off the coast of Scotland in 1995. Many companies are developing wave energy harvesters and wave energy, but they are all expensive and inefficient. There have been no real breakthroughs in this field for fifty years, only newer versions of old approaches.
“A typical full-scale Waveberg would generate more than 100 kW of power — the energy equivalent of two barrels of oil a day.”
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