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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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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.