We live on a water planet. Roughly 71 percent of the Earth is covered in the stuff, and it’s constantly in motion — tides surging rhythmically; powerful currents coursing beneath the surface; waves rolling across oceans and crashing against continents. All that motion produces mind-boggling quantities of kinetic energy, just a stone’s throw from some… Keep reading →
Perhaps someday – if, thirty or fifty years from now, wave energy converters and tidal stream generators become commonplace – it will be a largely forgotten blip in the sector’s long evolution from notion to reality. But in the here and now, marine energy is suffering. The latest sign: The European Marine Energy Centre in… Keep reading →
Doesn’t anyone remember LIMPET? Agucadoura? Despite what you might have read, the Carnegie Wave Energy project at Garden Island, off Perth, Australia, is not the world’s first grid-connected wave power station, nor the first grid-connected wave power array. The 500-kilowatt-rated LIMPET – that’s Land Installed Marine Power Energy Transmitter – commissioned in spring 2001 on… Keep reading →
It’s been a long, hard winter for wave energy, with reports of failure and retrenchment streaming out of Europe. But, hey, it’s still summer Down Under, and Australia has delivered a rare sunny wave story. The question is whether the Carnegie Wave Energy system near Perth – it officially began piping energy to the grid… Keep reading →
Pelamis, long a leading player in the wave energy industry, has gone “into administration,” akin to Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The fall of the Scottish company, announced on Friday, was a blow to Scotland and a sign of the tremendous challenges wave developers face – but it might also signal a necessary winnowing of the incipient… Keep reading →
Wave energy – recently characterized by one leading academic in the field as being “in kindergarten” compared to fossil fuels – isn’t about to graduate to the big time, but the effort to build a meaningful industry in the U.S. could advance several grades in the next few years. Not one, not two, but at… Keep reading →
A novel approach to generating wave energy moved forward in Oregon on Thursday with the launch of the M3 Wave APEX, an experimental device that hopes to beat the bobbers – devices that generate power through mechanical action at the ocean surface – by sitting stationary at the bottom of the sea. Essentially, it hopes… Keep reading →
Thank your lucky stars, Australia. Ocean Power Technologies (OPT) left town before too much damage could be done. Meanwhile, a message to U.S. wave energy fans: Don’t lose faith. Oregon, which also suffered a big OPT disappointment, seems to be bouncing back just fine. First the Australia story: OPT last week pulled the plug on… Keep reading →
Industry leaders gathered last week at the Global Marine Renewable Energy Conference in Seattle, mindful that wave and tidal are clean energy’s infants, on the cusp of toddlerhood, struggling to get up on their feet, while older siblings wind and solar sprint to new records. Nobody has lost faith that the vast energy of the… Keep reading →
Last fall, the imminent deployment of a fully approved wave energy buoy off Oregon had a lot of people excited. Even the New York Times busted out a long story as Oregon held its fingers crossed that its investment in wave energy might blossom, sending energy to the coast and growing jobs there and elsewhere in… Keep reading →
