How Wave Power Could Be The Future Of Energy

What do you think of catching waves for power? The first 100 people to use code UNDECIDED at the link below will get 60% off of Incogni: incogni.com/undecided. If you liked this, check out Why This NASA Battery May Be The Future of Energy Storage https://youtu.be/2zG-ZrC4BO0?list=PLnTSM-ORSgi4dFnLD9622FK77atWtQVv7

Wave energy has great potential, but like many new technologies, it has it's ups and downs.

Just finished my degree in naval engineer, where we actually did som research and testing of wave generators. The elephant in the room of any energy harvesting is the efficiency, and we struggled to get even 1% efficiency. Meaning that when a wave passes, we extract 1% of it's energy. If you were to have 100% efficiency, then there wouldn't be any waves behind the device at all, which is speculated to be impossible (just like the wind turbine problem of 100% efficiency being physically impossible). But the energy density of waves is huge, so we should be happy to see even 5% efficiency. The best option we saw for minimizing cost was to keep all facilities adjacent to land, so only the kinetic parts was in water, and generators on land. Means that pretty much all maintenance is reduced and can be done from land, also reducing the cost by insane amounts

There's been wave power research in the Shetlands and Orkneys, north of Scotland, for over twenty years now. I vaguely remember something from the early/mid 90's where someone showed off technology at the time. What was interesting about it was that the technology actually dissipated some of the wave power so that the waves reaching the shore were less powerful and damaging than they had been before.

In 1980, when I started a vo-tech program to be an electrician, my instructor challenged us to figure out how to harness waves to generate electricity. He said there are a lot of things to overcome but the possibilities were limitless.

I actually had a renewable energy course where one of our homework assignments was calculating energy output from waves. It depends on the coastline but most coastlines of developed nations are more like 5-10kw/m. The US has an estimated 1170 TWh per year of potential wave energy on the coastlines but 50% of that is in the Alaskan coastline in specific spots and that isn't considering conversion efficiency and transmission. Even including the heavily inflated Alaskan numbers, the US coastline is an estimated 153,646km long from NOAA. So that's 7614.9MWh/km of annual production. Assuming a combined conversion and transmission efficiency of around 80% it would be 6091.92MWh/km. So to power a state like IL which uses 197.6TWh annually you are going to need 32,436.4km of pure wave generation on the coast in high wave areas to power one state, not including spacing between the units and maintained access. You're going to need to consume an absurd amount of the coastline to power just a city. 80% efficiency WITHOUT considering transmission and conversion, just pure kinetic absorption is also insanely high because it would mean you are taking a 10m high wave and turning it into a 2m high wave. Real world efficiencies seem to be in the single digits right now. Realistically, after spending money on marine resistant materials, bearings, and maintenance I have an extremely hard time believing the low cost/kw these start ups are promising. I think this is why all of the actual wave generation facilities deployed have produced far under target or were shutdown or converted to research facilities only. I'd like to be proven very wrong but I just don't think there is that much cheap energy in readily available in waves compared to something like solar and batteries.

I think its really cool that they made the device smart enough to dive when seas and waves are too powerful to generate power with out damaging the device. THATS GENIOUS! In places where hurricanes are frequent that is a massive protection of your investment.

Tsunamis gonna be hitting different

There was some testing done in Orkney in the north of Scotland. After about a decade of testing, both systems were retired. One thing that caught my eye was that neither system returned in the course of its lifetime the energy spent in making it… I spoke to an engineer who was involved in the project and he explained that the harsh marine conditions, on the one hand, and the slow speeds but great forces exerted, on the other hand, make it very difficult to make a resilient and reliable system. It’ll be brilliant, of course, if a good way was found to harvest wave energy, but I am less optimistic than I used to be that this is a worthwhile approach to renewable energy.

We need to be developing these for the Great Lakes Now.

Love the power of the ocean. Couple corrections: sometimes the sea is calm - not often, but sometimes. And weather bouys are a great example of tech that's handled the harsh conditions for decades.

i just started college as an oceanography major and this is the kinda thing i could get a career in

With all these hurricanes lately that output is gonna be crazy

I love the variety of solutions shown in this video! Reminds me of the “glory days” of automotive and aviation development allowing non-scientists see lots of creative solutions and predict the winners. Kind of like season 1 of Battlebots. Measuring environmental impact looks challenging…. Seems to me there is great potential for coastal areas though I had not considered your point about these systems increasing complexity to the grid. Comparing costs might be tricky using optimized solar and wind designs to the comparatively newer tidal/wave systems. Somehow you need an offset for predicted reductions from development of the newer systems (assuming they prove to be technically and financially feasible). Your videos are consistently interesting to me! Thank you for producing them!

I have never seen a project with a specific sim that has produced such a wide array of solutions and mechanical styles. I supposed the unpredictability of the waves, and the salt water make this so much more challenging. But wow this is mindblowing.

Now that would be a good megaproject to start.

One reason that I like wave energy is that if we extract energy from the waves before they hit the coast it will reduce erosion.

In the mid 70’s, I saw a wave-power device that looked remarkably like a single pair of those yellow slats with a single flex-point (?) between them to generate a current. How encouraging that it’s only taken us 50-odd years to string twenty or so of them together. Go humans!

There is room for wave power on sites of coastal errosion. I think the best design for this are air rams where the waves act like pistons in tubes and drive tesla turbines to generate electricity. Taking the power out of the wave thereby reduces errosion. The sites would be good for battery storage as well.

sounds like a great thing to invest in early