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

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I think it's more the puffery that I object to than the prototype; people build prototypes and sometimes they don't work, but they don't generally stick up a Web site with plans for their giant chicken-breeding facility when it's not clear whether or not any eggs have survived from when they last dropped the basket.

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.

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

I hate puffery too, but it is an accepted way to raise venture capital. Nobody can invest in you if they don't know about you.