World’s First Commercial Wave Energy Farm Goes Live
Earlier this week, Portugal debuted the world’s first commercial wave energy farm. Wave energy at the Agucadoura station is converted into electricity with the use of three red “sea-snakes”, or cylindrical wave energy converters, that are attached to the seabed off Portugal’s northern coast. Energy captured by the sea-snakes is carried to an undersea cable station, where it is then fed into the electrical grid.
The devices will generate 2.25 MW of electricity— enough to power 1,500 homes. Ultimately, the wave power station will expand to produce up to 21 MW of power.
Unfortunately, wave power is not price competitive in Portugal at the moment. The €9m project was only made possible by the country’s feed-in tariff, which requires utilities to buy renewable energy from a wide range of producers. However, proponents of the farm believe that wave energy could be cost-efficient within 15 years.
Agucadoura’s farm is a only a small part of Portugal’s renewable energy plans, which include both the world’s largest wind farm and the world’s largest solar farm. The country hopes to generate 60 percent of its total energy from renewables by 2020.
More Posts on Alternative Energy:
- Wind-Powered Tall Ships Are Once Again Important As Oil Prices Hurt Trade
- 4 Reasons Why Germany Is A Renewable Energy Success Story
- Texas To Build Wind Power Superhighway
Wow, that is absolutely amazing! I hope other farms will follow.
http://www.anonweb.eu.tc
Lame. Ocean-power is nothing new. The true challenge of Portugal’s system will be how long it can endure the ocean’s waves. A system is being built in Australia that’s completely submerged so as to avoid the eye sore problem and to reduce the pounding by surface waves.
This is amazing. Being the first project in the world, everyone else can learn from it, even Australia. Congrats to Portugal
Energy generators of this type are extremely flawed and inefficient. While the upper most portion of the water column contains the most energy–it is the most difficult to capture and convert.
Wow, Ariel, you have some great commenters here. Smart people.
I’m a fan of ocean energy, because the potential is just enormous. Internet Reader and Alpha certainly sound like they know what they’re talking about, but I’d like to remind them that our earliest ventures into energy were equally inefficient. Of course, back then the only thing we had to compare it to was manual labor, so it looked much better than it actually was from today’s perspective.
Still, they’re quite correct that this technology and others like it are not likely to be adopted until the kinks are worked out. That’s the real value of these projects though, in my opinion. We’re learning, and we’ll get better. Renewable energy is all over the place. We just have to get better at capturing it.
The even better news is that dozens of other companies around the world also have sea based wind, wave, solar, tidal, and deep ocean currents power sources in late stages of development and some are in the testing stages.
They are also starting work on the ocean temperature differences, pumping cold deep ocean sea water up to cool our coastal cities.
Next will be massive desalination plants utilizing various combinations of all these power technologies for potable water, industrial and agricultural use. They will start out pumping water into the driest portions of coastal states, and gradualy expand the areas served.
Of course as most urban areas are already on the water grid, it will not take much to hook into that grid to sell desalinated water hundreds of miles inland.
As soon as they get sea water moving thru the pipes and being desalinated, they will start recovering the hundreds of minerals and chemicals in sea water that have merchantable value. Right now as I understand it only 4 or 5 minerals such as salt are routinely separated from sea water for sale. That will change big time, with many more being recovered; things like mercury and uranium, tin and silver, on and on.
larry hagedon
larryhagedon,
What you are talking about is decades away. The efficiency of deep-sea energies are terribly inefficient, and pales in comparison to other clean, renewable energy sources that are in the near future (for example, fusion power as produced by the under-construction HiPER). Also, removing minerals from sea water is mostly unnecessary. For example, the extraction of uranium from water requires an exorbitant amount of water and a complex system of electromagnetic and ion controls. Plus, uranium can really only be used for nuclear weapons and unclean (and sometimes dangerous) fission power.
You speak of inefficient? When the power from these sources is free and perpetual, how in Hell does efficiency get measured? Against what? It is free and perpetual to start with! Take as much as you like, more comes! Naturally, the guy with the least invested who reaps the most power will make more money at first, but as time goes on, the energy keeps flowing, diminishing the original cost to zero anyway, not so? Thankfully, every dawn brings a new invention or refinement that either helps us use power with greater efficiency or to produce more power for a given cash input, but the point I try to make is that solar, wind, wave, tidal, and geothermal power all seem infinite,renewable, and “Perpetual”, no efficiency factor needed - forever producing! The physics of forbidden propagandized perpetual power was always here, just perverted away from our logic by semantics!