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fivemackhttp://www.tridentenergy.co.uk/index.php
I don't quite understand how what these people are trying to do makes any kind of sense at all; their Web site looks like the write-up of a good A-level design technology project, and says in pieces dated February that they're about to start the test that clearly just failed to start in mid-September. The design seems to have a single guidance bearing taking all the sideways force of North Sea waves, held up on a remarkably flimsy-looking tower, and their prototype is made of eighty tons of steel and using four quite complicated linear generators to generate twenty measly kilowatts. I admit that I was slightly surprised that any marine engineers were involved in the endeavour at all.
What have I missed?
I'm sure it's unfair to compare the cost of tidal equipment to that of wind or solar; there's been, what, three orders of magnitude more money available for optimising wind and solar. But I can't help feeling there's a conclusion to draw from the fact that almost every story I read about wave power involves a wave-power demonstration, set up by a small company and producing less power than the smallest wind turbine Vestas will deign to sell, being destroyed by the wrath of Poseidon.
I don't quite understand how what these people are trying to do makes any kind of sense at all; their Web site looks like the write-up of a good A-level design technology project, and says in pieces dated February that they're about to start the test that clearly just failed to start in mid-September. The design seems to have a single guidance bearing taking all the sideways force of North Sea waves, held up on a remarkably flimsy-looking tower, and their prototype is made of eighty tons of steel and using four quite complicated linear generators to generate twenty measly kilowatts. I admit that I was slightly surprised that any marine engineers were involved in the endeavour at all.
What have I missed?
I'm sure it's unfair to compare the cost of tidal equipment to that of wind or solar; there's been, what, three orders of magnitude more money available for optimising wind and solar. But I can't help feeling there's a conclusion to draw from the fact that almost every story I read about wave power involves a wave-power demonstration, set up by a small company and producing less power than the smallest wind turbine Vestas will deign to sell, being destroyed by the wrath of Poseidon.
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no subject
Date: 2009-09-22 08:33 am (UTC)And indeed the generator is serious engineering by serious engineers. I know (ref: private communication) that the bearings are one of the difficult and clever bits; the actual linear generator is very simple---and therefore potentially cheap and robust enough to make power economically.
You might read this embarrassing episode as a parable of the well-known weaknesses in this country's route for bringing inventions and basic research into commercial products: capture at too early a stage by the money-men from the technologists.
As I understand it (op cit.) much of the delay in launching the trial was caused by arguments over how to moor the rig. The engineers wanted to use a robust four-point mooring where the capitalists (who by now have a controlling interest) were wanting a two-point one. An independent report was commissioned and backed the engineers.
My guess would be that similar corner-cutting, which the engineers in this case couldn't head off, will have been responsible for the manner in which the rig was launched and for this catastrophe. Such a waste.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-22 12:39 pm (UTC)I suppose I'm uneasy with the idea of doing the setup for commercialisation before you've got a prototype working at sea (that is, precisely the weakness you mention in paragraph three). I really don't see how anyone could have been convinced by the documents on the Web site that the technology would scale to economic production and that they should invest significant money in it, though I suppose I'm strongly not the target audience and perhaps the target audience of investors would be attracted rather than repelled by the list of CVs of the board members.
I do hope they'll be able to fix the rig.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-22 01:18 pm (UTC)Not every invention spins out of a university. At the gaps between the various layers of state funding even the most publicly beneficial ideas are going to need people to put their money where their mouth is. And as a taxpayer I'm happy with the idea that projects aren't mollycoddled from cradle to white-elephant grave.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-22 01:46 pm (UTC)I think that trying to develop CO2-free energy in a way which results in privately-held patents is a Really Bad Idea, because having license fees attached to the technology adds another difficult burden to the already-hard task of convincing Indians to use expensive CO2-free technology rather than the cheap world-destroying kind. The rich West will almost surely end up having to pay them the difference in cost anyway; adding license fees to this is a pure transfer of the taxpayer's money to the kind of guys who make up the board of Trident Power.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-22 02:31 pm (UTC)There isn't "the technology" for CO2-free energy. There's "a wide range" of possible technologies, none of which (with the arguable exception of nuclear fission) are yet able to do what the world needs of them. Exploiting any of these takes investment and is a risk. That capsize will have added another six-figure sum to the million or so that Trident have spent on the rig and research so far. The patent is a piece of property whose value at a given time reflects the work and money put into the idea so far, and the possible returns if it's commercialisable---the license fees will pay for that work and the use of that money. This works for renewable power just as it works for medicines and textile machinery and steam engines and everything else.
The Trident Energy board, however ugly their faces, are not going to get unusually rich from their patents, even if they manage to avoid suing each other over the capsize. There are plenty more hurdles for them before anyone could sell electricity using their invention, plenty of competitor inventions, and an easy political cap on the amount of subsidy they could receive. And if despite everything they do make more money than they could have got for their time teaching in a university, or for the capital deployed than they could have got sticking it in a bank account, that seems to me like the normal effect of wealth generation. You don't begrudge the wealth of Paul Drayson of Powderject, or the other spin-out companies, presumably?
Unlike the pure rent we are all paying to the sheiks sitting on all that oil we're burning now---who really are obscenely rich.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-22 02:40 pm (UTC)For what it's worth, I don't think technology rights add a measurable amount to the cost of a solar panel. But then as you point out, a lot more has been spent on developing solar panels than wave power, to date, so the incremental tech cost is well-amortised.
I suppose I think that the public sector should fund big demonstration projects like tidal and wave plants (which may need to be bigger than 20kW to get to economic scale, so should be tested at a bigger scale) and then use market-based mechanisms to incentivise technologies which are further along (wind) or can be deployed effectively on a small scale (PV). But trying out a 20kW system and seeing how it breaks must be better than nothing...
no subject
Date: 2009-09-22 09:49 pm (UTC)Something like the SeaGen marine-current turbine mentioned below seems to have got to the stage where the appropriate thing to apply to it is clearly capitalism; PV has been at that stage for quite a while.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-23 10:00 am (UTC)