As construction begins on a ground-breaking wave energy project in Perth, a report has been released which emphasises the huge untapped energy potential lying off Australia’s coastlines.According to the Marine Nation 2025 report, released this week, Australia’s oceans could produce billions of dollars’ worth of clean energy in the form of electricity generated by wave power. The report says an initial assessment has identified world-class wave energy resources along the western and southern coastline, and valuable tidal energy resources in the North West of Australia.
Marine Nation 2025 was prepared by the Federal Government’s Oceans Policy Science Advisory Group and highlights the enormous potential of Australia’s oceans, as well as the challenges and opportunities involved with managing our vast maritime resources.
The report comes on the eve of the commencement of the Perth Wave Energy Project, which is due to begin next month. Located at Garden Island, near Perth, the project will start delivering green energy to the grid in 2014. The project will be Australia’s first commercial wave energy project connected to the electricity grid. An associated wave-powered desalination plant will be a world first.
A CSIRO study released last year revealed that ocean waves have the potential to power a city the size of Melbourne by 2050. CSIRO’s Ocean renewable energy: 2015-2050 report said Australia’s ocean waves could supply about 10 per cent of Australia’s electricity by the middle of this century.
Saturday, 25 May 2013
Wednesday, 25 July 2012
Did you know that wave energy has the potential to supply about 11 per cent of Australia’s electricity – the equivalent to powering a city the size of Melbourne – by 2050?If the results of yesterday’s Climate Institute’s “Climate of the Nation 2012″ report are anything to go by, you probably didn’t. Because while that study found overwhelming support among Australians for the development of renewables, most of this was directed towards solar, wind and hydro, with only 25 per cent of respondents nominating wave energy as their most preferred option (although this number still beat out nuclear and coal).
The fact is, not nearly enough is known about ocean renewable energy in Australia – a situation the CSIRO hopes to redress with its new report, “Ocean renewable energy: 2015-2050.” The report, released today – and from which the above fact was gleaned – is the result of the CSIRO’s efforts to understand the potential of this clean energy source, and to inform the ocean energy industry, government and investors about the challenges and potential for the technology.
“Given the potential of ocean energy and the fact that it’s a very new technology, CSIRO wanted to understand what is the sustainable level at which this resource could be used for energy supply and whether it could be competitive with other energy technologies,” said Ian Cresswell, acting director of the CSIRO Wealth from Oceans Flagship. “Assessing the opportunities and challenges from resource to the market is a first for ocean renewable energy in Australia.”
The study was carried out by the Wealth from Oceans and Energy Transformed Flagships and included an analysis of the resource, cost to market, technologies and future take-up projections by oceanographers, engineers, economists. It also engaged the ocean energy industry and related sectors.
As the report – which can now be viewed online – points out, wave energy converters are still an emerging technology. CSIRO’s research uncovered at least 200 devices around the world in various stages of testing and demonstration, but found that relatively few had publicly available data on deployments at sea in full operational mode. ...
Nonetheless, the study identified 16 Australian companies that are either actively developing ORE projects, have received significant government and/or private funding, or have announced ORE plans; and it pointed to some home-grown technologies being offered to the market – the most advanced being the CETO submerged buoy system, and the OceanLinx oscillating water column system.
The largest ORE project in Australia (recipient of a $66 million grant from the federal government) was identified as the construction of a wave farm off the coast of Victoria by Ocean Power Technologies Australasia (OPTA), a company with a US-based parent.
As for Australia’s ocean energy potential, the report found that Australia has an abundant wave energy resource and could produce 24-hour power, either from the tides, currents or waves. The nation’s best resource was found to be concentrated along the southern coastline, as well as a consistent, yet smaller, contribution on the east coast – although the report said characterisation of this resource area required further attention.
The areas the report says could benefit most from wave energy technology include Perth, the southern coastline, and (less-so) the east coast of Australia (see chart below). It also found that tidal technology could supply niche areas such as north east Tasmania and WA’s Kimberley region and ocean thermal energy off the coast of far north Queensland.
Thursday, 5 July 2012
As part of a new study on wave power, the University of Exeter and Tel Aviv University have come up with a system that predicts the power of waves in order to maximize wave energy devices' ability to generate energy from the sea. The researchers found that this system could potentially double the amount of wave energy generated by a device.Phys.org reports, "The research focused on point absorbers, commonly-used floating devices with parts that move in response to waves, generating energy which they feed back to the grid. Point absorbers are already known to be much more efficient in the amount of energy they produce if their response closely matches the force of the waves and previous research has looked at trying to increase this efficiency. However, this is the first study that has focused on increasing the device's efficiency by predicting and controlling internal forces of the device caused by forthcoming waves."
Wave energy potential is huge. It's been estimated that it could power the world twice over and the UK, where this study was conducted, could be powered twice over just by utilizing wave energy generators along its coastlines. So far, wave energy technologies haven't gained traction the way that solar and wind technologies have because the ocean is a very inhospitable place. Wave energy generators have to be able to withstand the force of each wave.
This new system predicts the power of the incoming wave, allowing the device to respond in a way that extracts the most amount of energy. This controlled reaction not only increases the efficiency of the device, but protects it from damage from rough seas. Where most current wave technologies would be shut off during a storm, a prediction system could allow the wave generator to keep operating effectively.
The University of Exeter is now working with Ocean Power Technologies, one of the largest wave energy companies, to further test the results and develop better technologies based on this research.
Wednesday, 4 July 2012
The Australian government as upped its investment in two nascent, Australian-developed wave energy technologies, announcing new grants worth almost $10 million to help bring the two new systems to the market, including what is believed to be the world’s biggest wave energy turbine.The government is providing $5.6 million to BioPower Systems to install a 250kW full-scale pilot plant of its bioWAVE technology off the coast of Victoria, and is also providing just under $4 million to Oceanlinx, to install a 1MW demonstration plan of its Greenwave technology in South Australia.
Both grants are being made under the $126 million Emerging Renewables program, and follow an earlier $9 million grant to Carnegie Wave Energy, which is building a $31 million, 2MW grid-connected demonstration of its CETO technology near Fremantle in Western Australia.
BioPower CEO Tim Finnigan said the grant, along with a $5 million grant from the Victorian state government, means that its $15 million project was now fully funded. “This puts us into a position to complete the project, get it on the grid, and prove the technology at scale,” he told RenewEconomy. “It’s a pretty big development for us.”
The technology is best described with an image, see below. It’s designed to lay flat on the ocean floor when the waves become too big (it calculated this to be around 1 per cent of the time).
It is designed to absorb energy both at the surface and below. It is mounted on sea-floor, the demonstrator will be in about 30m of water, and the array of buoyant floats, sways back-and-forth in tune with the waves, and the energy contained in this motion is converted to electricity by an onboard self-contained power conversion module, and is delivered through a cable.
However, the first demonstration plan will weigh 400 tonnes when it is installed at a site 4kms from Port Fairy on the southern coast of Victoria. “We not trying to prove a light-weight structure right now,” Finnigan says. “We will carve our way to that over time.”
Like Carnegie Energy, Finnigan says the long term goal for wave energy has to be to match wind – which means capital costs of around $2 million/megawatt and a levellised cost of energy at $100/MWh or below. He says BioPower has a four-stage plan to reach that target by the end of the decade. ...
Meanwhile, Oceanlinx says it believes its GreenWave device (see below) is the first in the world to be rated at 1MW, and its efficiency has improved 50 per cent since an earlier, smaller version that was deployed near Port Kembla in NSW. The 20m by 20m structure, around 17m high, will sit in around 10m of water. It features an oscillating water column, with the turbine and other moving parts above the waterline. The 2,000 tonne concrete structure will sit on the ocean floor.
CEO Ali Baghaei says this demonstration unit will have an LCOE of 28c/kWh, which will fall to 16c/kWh once 5MW have been installed and to below 10c/kWh once 75MW have been installed. The initial project will cost $7.2 million, with the balance coming from a recent $8 million fund raising from existing investors. ...
Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson said the grants made Australia “one of the world’s largest supporters” of wave energy technology. “Wave energy is still very much an emerging technology and this funding will position Australia as a global leader in developing this technology,” he said in a statement, adding that wave energy had the potential of providing 1300 terawatt hours per year, or about five times Australia’s total electricity requirements.
Friday, 27 January 2012
A Devon inventor's electricity from seawater generator could be sited at 200 points around the UK coastline.
Energy firm Ecotricity wants to develop a commercial Searaser for testing off Falmouth in Cornwall and put hundreds around the coast in five years. Dale Vince of Ecotricity said the potential was "enormous".
The Searaser machine works by using wave energy to pump water up to container tanks and the water is then released to a hydro-electric turbine.
Searaser is the brainchild of British engineer Alvin Smith from Dartmouth. He came up with the idea about 10 years ago while he was playing with an inflatable ball in a swimming pool.
Searaser pumps seawater using a vertical piston between two buoys - one on the surface of the water, the other suspended underwater and tethered to a weight on the seabed.
As the ocean swell moves the buoys up and down, the piston works like a bicycle pump to send seawater through a pipe to an onshore turbine to produce electricity or to a coastal storage reservoir. It can then be released through a generator as required.
Sunday, 4 December 2011
A world-first wave energy project which mimics the movement of seaweed and kelp through the water will power hundreds of homes in Victoria's southwest.
The $14 million BioWAVE project is a single wave energy unit that will be anchored to the sea floor 30 metres underwater and about 800 metres from the shore at a site four kilometres west of Port Fairy.
The 450kW unit will be connected to the energy grid and power 300 homes by early 2013.
The project is an example of biomimicry, in which biological traits are used in engineered systems.
The Victorian government has put $5 million towards the project and other partners include AGL Energy Bluescope Steel, Lend Lease, Swinburne University, the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney.
Tuesday, 27 September 2011
Perth-based Carnegie Wave Energy has delivered the first of its new generation CETO 4 units to the Indian Ocean island of Reunion in what it expects will be the first step towards the establishment of a 15MW facility there. The CETO 4 unit, an upgraded version of the CETO 3 unit that has been tested off Fremantle, was delivered to Reunion by French naval defence logisitics group DCNS.
The unit will be deployed during the coming summer, and if successful wlll be followed by a grid-connected 2MW project, and a further expansion to 15MW. The project is being supported by the French government, which is providing two thirds of the funding through grants, and also a marine energy feed-in-tariff equivalent to Eur22c/kWh.
Carnegie CEO Michael Ottaviano said the new unit would test new design ideas, and also a different wave climate. The project was the first to be jointly conducted with French energy giant EDF, as well as DCNS. Carnegie will receive a licensing fee from EDF for the deployment of any further projects in Reunion and the northern hemisphere.
