Remote Tasmanian island to be powered by ‘blowhole’ wave energy

And here's another, hydraulic/compressor design developed in Israel in 2011 by Inna Bravermann (24 when she founded Eco Wave Power). The design is said to produce 1MW per $1MM. A pilot plant was installed on Gibraltar's coast in 2016; by 2018 it had 15,000 grid-connected hours. It now has projects around the world for over 100MW.

Ted talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_OFBmqKP8E

News page: https://www.ecowavepower.com/news-media/

Presumably with the same antifoul paints we use to protect large ocean going ships, which cannot be hauled like pleasure vessels every 12-18 months for re-application.

I remember seeing an episode of Tomorrow’s World (BBC) in the 1980s where more or less this system was used to generate electricity from anywhere there was a change of water height, so even in small scale at weirs which was the demonstration project. It’s quite possible the TV piece was aired showcasing an implementation of Well’s original work, as it captured energy from air that switched directions forced by water moving through a tube, and power was generated in both phases.

There are obviously countless inventions that never make it for one reason or another, timing can be the biggest issue if investment policy is not pointing in the right direction to develop them further, and I suspect a lot of solutions for environmental problems fell into this hole in the last century when economic growth at any cost was the mantra. Hopefully more of the work that was done then might resurface.

The compression is a good thing, it drives the power to the turbine in the first place and also acts like a spring so it'll smooth out the energy impulse from the waves.

One of the big problems with other wave energy systems is the stress from waves is pretty peaky so the generators have to spin up and down a lot and then also deal with storms. In this the air acts like a cushion to the peaks of energy from waves and the whole power generation side can be bypassed in a storm even by just opening another air path.

This seems so inefficient: you're transferring power from the sun into carboniferous life forms, then relying on the compression of the earth to squeeze that carbon into a dense form. Then you have to mine, ship, store, and burn that carbon to boil water to turn turbines -- you are losing a lot of the power in harvest transport alone, let alone the steam cycle. Plus you get all the downsides of combustion: fly ash and greenhouse gases.

Non sarcastic response: Different sites are going to have different needs and different local resources they can exploit for energy. There may be reasons why solar, wind, nuclear, etc. might not be appropriate here.

Isn't that traditional? We lack most mechanisms of extracting power from sources. Like, even with nuclear radiation we insist on converting to steam generally.

Some times an effective mechanism doesn't exist. Like how if I could, the ideal way to warm my home would be to just transmit power to a bubble around me and warm that, since the rest of the house doesn't need warming, but there is no pleasant way to do that so you use a couple of low efficiency ways:

* heating the entire house

* using lots of energy to grow plants for animals to eat so you can consume them so you can generate heat you can keep within insulation with a sweater

We're dipping our fingers into a massive untapped stream of energy. It's also a vehicle for sustainable energy (part of a portfolio) that deserves investigation.