Welsh wave farm to power 60,000 homes

[jpak]

http://www.edie.net/news/news_story.asp?id=11184&channel=0

The £5m of funding will be spent on the first "wave dragon" device to be deployed off the coast of West Wales in mid-2007, in time for the winter storms.

The project envisages a total of 11 machines floating 10km off the coast by 2010, channelling waves into reservoirs above sea level, and using their kinetic energy to generate electricity in much the same way as hydro-power plants. The electricity will then be fed it into the mainland grid via power cables connecting the machines to the shore.

"Once the design proves itself by surviving the winter, we will proceed with the full-scale project," a spokesman for KP Renewables told edie.

<snip>

"It is a question of scale - these devices produce 7 megawatts of power each, while most others so far give an output measured in kilowatts. This will also give much better economies of scale and help to reduce costs," the KP Renewables spokesman explained.

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[GreenPartyVoter]

1. Very cool!

[pinto]

2. Good example of fitting the technology, and the scale, to the area.

Thanks for the find.

[acmejack]

3. Simple construction - complex design

snip>
The basic idea of the Wave Dragon wave energy converter is to use well-known and well-proven principles from traditional hydropower plants in an offshore floating platform.

It is really very simple: The Wave Dragon overtopping device elevates ocean waves to a reservoir above sea level where water is let out through a number of turbines and in this way transformed into electricity, i.e. a three-step energy conversion:

Overtopping (absorption) -> Storage (reservoir) -> power-take-off (low-head hydro turbines).

http://www.wavedragon.net/

[Lerkfish]

4. damn! this is my idea I've had since high school...er...1977

but not being an engineer or anything....sigh

[BoneDaddy]

5. The other side that is key in this

is the fact that the Welsh people who will benefit from this live simply. They do not need as much because they have learned to live in relative harmony with the natural world.
If anything like this would work in America, we would need to drastically reduce our energy usage.

[Dogmudgeon]

6. Isn't there a lot of industry in Wales?

That's my main concern about the arcadian, super-low-tech renewable ideas -- they don't scale up very well for industry. But for residential and domestic use, they are excellent, and could "liberate" most homeowners from high-priced home power, as well as make energy-gap disasters survivable.

--p!

[Dead_Parrot]

7. Not a huge amount

There's a belt along the south coast (Swansea/Cardiff) that still has some heavy stuff - the steel mill at Port Talbot and refinery complex at Milford Haven spring to mind - but most of it was shut down after the coal mines shut down. The rest is sheep, unemployment, tourism and sheep, and is probably a prime target for renewables since they also have a couple of pumped storage hydro schemes to hand.