Video: Max Carcas of Ocean Power Delivery
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 02.12.07
We've written about Google Talks before (see Google TechTalks: Climate Change, Carbon Trading and Biofuels) and how they are a good way to hear speakers talk about a variety of topics, including environment-related ones. Today we want to highlight this Google Talk by Max Carcas of Ocean Power Delivery (the company was formed in 1998 and is based in Edinburgh, Scotland) about how we can harness the ocean's waves to create clean energy. The talk is a bit technical and long, and the presentation is not very exciting, but if you can get passed that, the content is very interesting. If Mr. Carcas or anyone at Ocean Power Delivery is reading this, we'd love for you to make a shorter and more "viewer-friendly" version of this talk. We'd definitely show it on TreeHugger, wave power deserves a bigger share of the spotlight.
For those who still doubt the potential of wave energy: "The World Energy Council has estimated the ‘useful’ global ocean wave energy resource as ... >2TW (17,500TWh/year). From this it has been estimated (Thorpe 1999) that the practical economic contribution from wave energy converters could be 2,000TWh/year (similar to current installed nuclear or hydroelectric generation capacity). Such generating capacity could result in up to 2 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions being displaced from fossil fuel generation per year - similar to current emissions from electricity generation in the US." Max Carcas also says (we're paraphrasing): If you take a square meter on the ground, with solar, you have around 100 watts of energy. A square meter in the air, with wind you may have a thousand watts. But off the coasts of Europe and North-America, you have energy densities of 20,000 to 70,000 watts per square meter of ocean. You can watch the video here.
BS alert-
His energy density figures are basically lies.
The 100 watts per square meter solar is the enegy captured with cheap solar- there are actually 1000 watts of energy in a square meter of sunlight and there are higher yielding technologies such as solar stirling which can recover considerably more than 10%.
Then, he cites 20,000 - 70,000 watts for wave energy.
Thats the full potential, which is never recovered, and probably during a hurricane.
Putting such extreme spin on the basic facts will only hurt green power and the move to alternate sources of energy.
We don't want hucksters leading the way forward!!!
Hi Jay, where do you take your numbers? I'd love to see your sources.
His numbers do seem high, but then again, water has such a high density compared to wind that it wouldn't be surprising if it had that much more energy.
And the numbers he cites are for the coasts of the USA and Europe, but I'm pretty sure he's citing the sites that they'd want to develop, not the whole costs..
Jay Tee
I'm afraid I don't agree. Have a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolation
..you'll see that average solar radition in Scotland (my home country) is ~100W/m2. Granted in the US the average per sq. metre is probably more like 150W with high locations reaching as much as 250W - so I was being somewhat unfair to solar. However my point was not to 'knock' solar but really to illustrate the difference in magnitude with wave energy (20,000 to 70,000W per metre) rather than argue about a few watts.
Incidentally I think the figure you're quoting of 1000W per sq. metre is the midday peak. A similar 'peak' for wave energy (in a hurricane as you mention) would be energy levels of about 2,000,000W per metre! That said its not worth designing something to capture this energy level as its only there for a very small percentage of the time over the year - and that's the reason our machine looks the way it does - NOT to absorb this infrequent level of energy whilst to be closely coupled to what's there most of the time.
Michael/Treehugger - thanks for the mention - I'll try and make it more exciting next time.... :)