What once looked dismal now looks more promising. However, all wave energy devices have to have high inertia (mass) to withstand the impacts themselves. This may be a limiting factor in the overall scalability of this technology.
Although its difficult to find the technical data, what I have found, combined with my own calculations suggests this:
- Wind Turbine material cost is 10 kw/ton
- Power buoy technology looks like, at the moment, has
a cost of 2 kw/ton (5 times more material intensive)
- Optimistic designs exist (from Ocean Power Technologies) for a 500 KW 100 ton, 37 meter
wide boy so thats 5 Kw/ton. Given OPT's previous history, this
number is probably two high by a factor of 2
> so I would
argue that 2.5-3 kw/ton will be the material cost of power
buoy technolgy.
- But note that the Pelamis (sea snake) has a total weight
of 750 tons for a production of 750 KW. So that's 1 kw/ton
>
10 times worse than wind!
- New technology tidal turbine (see week 9) is 1.5 MW unit that is 21 m diameter intake tube and weighs 1350 tons! (note a 1.5 MW GE Wind turbine weighs 164 tons)
Tidal power works best in constriction zones. The following 7 locations have some of the world's greatest potentials.
The first location is in the Bay of Fundy and a small scale facility (20 MW or so) has been there for a couple of decades. There is a small island and the tidal dam extends on either side of the island. Its a bit hard to see because there are no high resolution images yet of this spot of the earth.
For each of the seven locations:
- Measure the width of the "tidal channel"
- Determine the country in which the tidal channel lies.
- 44 45 06 -65 30 39 (Bay of Fundy)
- 54 23 17 -05 34 39
- 60 26 11 -151 56 14
- 58 56 42 -03 20 14
- 02 10 19 101 49 33
- 21 23 42 72 24 33
- 61 34 42 163 30 21