Top-heavy marine device falls over, film at 11

[fivemack]

http://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.

Comments

[htfb.livejournal.com]

It's not the length or depth of the wire or pipe---transatlantic cables were laid in the nineteenth century. It's the capacitance between the wire and the seawater.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Last week National Grid started laying the 260km BritNed cable from the Isle of Grain to Rotterdam to carry a gigawatt to the Netherlands (cost €600 million); there's been a 2GW cable to France, eight parallel underwater cables of 46km each, since 1985.

National Grid are talking (http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmenergy/memo/futurenet/ucm02002.htm) about connecting up 32GW of wind turbines using cabling which will cost them up to five billion pounds (the wholesale price of 32GW * nine weeks, so even with a pessimistic load factor less than the price of the electricity the turbines would produce in a year) over the next fifteen years.

[htfb.livejournal.com]

BritNed and the link to France are HVDC (high voltage direct current) links, which is the technical solution to the capacitance problem. Other HVDC projects proposed will link Europe and Africa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects). It's not an insuperable difficulty, in other words.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

We seem to be agreeing furiously with one another that the cables are a well-understood problem - might be expensive, but will be available.

Will continue debating the merits of venture capitalism in the other thread.

[htfb.livejournal.com]

True. We should put our thoughts about power-transfer cables, which while an ecologically sound concept are a bit bland, to rest. But I'm loath to let so much fury just evaporate: can't these colourless green ideas sleep furiously?