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Pelamis Wave Power Converter feeding Energy into the grid (m.youtube.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/europe@feddit.org
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cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/23384142

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.

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[โ€“] [S] 5 points 10 months ago (8 children)

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.

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  • [โ€“] 3 points 10 months ago* (6 children)

    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

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  • [โ€“] [S] -2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

    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.

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  • [โ€“] 7 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    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).

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  • [โ€“] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    You're right that waves and wind don't necessarily overlap, they most often do anyway.

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  • [โ€“] [S] -1 points 10 months ago* (1 child)

    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?

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 9 months ago

    But that doesn't mean anything about whether or not it's windy at the same time.

    If the waves are too severe to allow servicing of the wind turbines, how do you think you're going to service wave generators? (yes, the answer is to wait until the sea and wind conditions are better)

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 9 months ago

    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.

    Because they needed to wait until semiconductor technology could support high-power frequency converters. Note how large wind turbines arrived at virtually the same time as VVVF drives on trains, and ships, and everything else. Unlike hydro, wind turbines can't efficiently generate at constant speed in widely varying conditions.

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