CleanTechnica

Oceanlinx; another Australian wave power company that uses the floating oil rig as the model for its wave power began installation this month of its last test before grid-connecting a 2.5 MW unit off the coast of Port Kembla, near Sydney.

It should be sending power to the Australian grid early next year. Unusually, for wave power concepts, this converts the energy of ocean swells under the platform into air pressure which turns a wind turbine. The company’s previous demo in 2007 proved it works.
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OceanWorksDevelopment; a group of 40 architects and planners has come up with a pretty wild and grandiose (or brilliant and visionary) solution to San Diego’s siting problems for its much needed new airport. Float the entire thing off-shore.

How serious are they? In a legally unprecedented move, OceanWorks CEO Adam Englund has booked the 40,000 square mile space on the Pacific with this claim holding “airport rights”.
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Underwater surveillance requires a certain supply of persistent power around the coasts, harbors, piers and offshore areas of this nation. Wave energy provides that certainty and reliability because nothing stops the supply chain of power from the roiling sea.

So the US Navy just awarded Lockheed Martin and Ocean Power Technologies a $15 million 4 year contract to provide wave power for terrorism prevention around the coasts. The collaboration holds the promise for finally bringing utility scale wave power to civilian use as well: there’s 2 Terawatts of wave energy potential around the world’s coasts. Twice what the entire world uses now.
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Somewhere in the U.S. there is a justice of the peace who still refuses to perform inter-racial marriages, but Principle Power, Inc. has no such backward looking qualms when it comes marrying two different forms of sustainable energy.  Last week the company won a $750,000 development grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to adapt its patented WindFloat platform to bring wave energy generating capability on board, along with the wind turbines for which it was originally designed.

Of particular interest to DOE is WindFloat’s innovative three-corner design, which stabilizes the platform against turbulence and enables it to be deployed in deep water where winds are more favorable to energy generation.  In addition to its obvious use in the civilian world, the marriage of wind and wave power may also prove fruitful for its application to the U.S. military’s need for non-petroleum energy sources at remote bases.

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In an elegant piece of sustainable engineering, the company Renew Blue, Inc. will use wave power to run a desalination plant in Freeport, Texas, then bottle the results in corn-based biodegradable plastic for sale under the Renew Blue brand.  The wave power system, called SEADOG, will employ a buoy-and-piston mechanism combined with a water wheel to generate electricity at an offshore platform, enough to power operations at the plant.

Though disposable bottled water is a thorn in the side of sustainability, the reality is that disposable bottles will be with us, at least for some limited uses, far into the foreseeable future.  The Renew Blue solution offers a way to provide the convenience with a lower carbon footprint.

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Solar Energy. Wind Energy. Now, Wave Energy. Reminds me of Captain Planet.

A Finnish company, AW-Energy, recently signed a $4.4 million (€3 million) contract with the European Union (EU) to implement WaveRoller (wave energy) technology in Portuguese waters. This looks interesting. The location for the project is near a town deemed to be “capital of the waves.”
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A new energy fund in the UK is looking to improve wave and tidal energy technologies and help put them into use. The new Marine Renewables Proving Fund contains about $36 million worth of new grants.

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There is a new force on the wave-energy front. It’s called the Oyster. If it is successful in its debut this autumn, it could change the face of wave energy forever. You see, this giant electricity producing machine is different from conventional wave-energy machines. And those differences could make it extremely marketable.

The Oyster is unlike other wave power devices in that it uses hydraulic technology to transfer wave power to the shore to be converted into electricity. The machine has an 18m wide oscillator, which Dr. Ronan Doherty, Chief Technical Officer of Aquamarine Power the Edinburgh based company which has developed the first ‘Oyster’, says is a key to the machine’s design. The oscillator is fitted with pistons, which work according to wave action. The pistons pump high-pressure water through sub-sea pipelines to shore, where traditional hydro-electric generators use the high-pressure water to create electricity.

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The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported good news for renewable energy enthusiasts this week. Energy from renewable resources has increased significantly over the last year. It is now higher than energy produced from nuclear power.
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A professor and student team have designed a network of modular floating docks to harness clean energy for New York City.

The eco-docks would generate the energy by harnessing tidal power from the city’s rivers; they should also help to add much needed green space above the dirty waters.

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