I just found your channel. I'm really impressed with the quality of your content! I did a wave energy startup for two years before joining SpaceX. The reason why wave energy is still interesting is that it has the potential to diversify the mixture of renewable energy sources. In a world where renewables make up a significant percentage of the mix, and for the same target level of energy reliability, wind+solar+wave+storage (or a backup) is potentially more cost effective than just wind+solar+storage (or a backup). In the early days, when renewables represented just a sliver of the energy pie chart, the intermittence of wind and solar was not a significant detractor. So, the simplicity of wind and solar won out over wave energy. There's hope that that will change. But wave energy remains hard because of challenges such as corrosion, storm survivability, biofouling, entanglement, marine life factors, and power transmission costs, to name a few.
Thanks so much! I wanted to apply for a job at SpaceX after I finished my PhD, but I wasn't allowed to even apply because I'm not a US citizen, so I can't work for a company with launch tech 😥 I agree that diversifying variable renewable generation sources is the best chance for wave energy. I am really hoping it breaks through, it is very cool technology! What kind of WEC was your company using, by the way?
@@EngineeringwithRosie We came up with an Oscillating Wave Surge Convertor with all moving parts safely sealed away on the inside and lots of integrated energy storage.
@@EngineeringwithRosie Please do study of hydrogen (oxygen) enhanced ICE. For the moment let's ignore the cost of hydrogen production. What is gross improvement in ICE power output, if hydrogen is used as an addative to the fuel/air mixture of traditional ICE machine. Like wise, what happens when oxygen is added to the ICE. And lastly, adding hydrogen gas and oxygen gas to ice air/fuel mixture.
An excellent video. I agree that the challenge with WEC is that the energy density of wavesis 10-100x greater than wind; It means WECs have to be so much heftier
Very nice commentary, and you see the word "economic" crop up over and over. "Economic" is, above-all, the make or break aspect to all WEC devices. I have been exploring WEC since the 1970s, most specifically as a hobby, because..... you see spectacular shortfalls, such as the Islay Limpet in Scotland, or the Pelamis project off Spain, and you don't wish to promise much and end up with basically a non-viable design and a bunch of people (and family) whose money you have flushed into bubbles, eternally angry with you. So I advocate and explore possible WECs, point absorbers, over-topping, buoyancy devices with tides, etc. I especially remember the Islay Limpet, and its simplicity and one moving part, the bi-directional air turbine. The device produced, day and night, only ONE-TENTH the electricity output that engineers had calculated. ONE-TENTH (
I have a question that is sort of in the same direction based on the need for storing renewable energy: That is wind and solar, hydro do just fine. :-) Why not use large air compressors instead of generator when building windmill parks. Storing the air and running a large generatur at a constant load. Used together with a cooling loop that catch the heat generated in the compression cycle the efficency should be fearly good. Advantages using this type as system, when storing is include, should be: - Reduced cost, since a large compressor is cheaper then a large generator. - Reduced enery loss from converting between energy types. - Reduced storage cost, since a large tank is cheaper then a large battery. - Reduced complexity, since an advanced gearing system is not need. The output do not need to be synchronize at 50 or 60 Hz. - Reduced impact on the environment since a lot less copper and rare earth minerals will be needed. - More stable since just a few large generator run at constant load can be used to generate electricity when needed. It would be interesting to se a video with pro and cons for a solution like this.
You've just (kind of) reinvented compressed air energy storage. Look it up if you haven't already, it's a very interesting technology that we arguably should be deploying more widely
@@gigabyte2248 You did not get that the point is not the metode of storage, but how we fill and use it. To generate electricity to run a compressor wast a lot of energy, and large generator are very complex and expensive. Large compressors are less complex, cheaper and last longer. Added heat capture also make thing much more efficent. Also I have studied just about any type of large scale use of compressed air as storage.
A thought: The research done on wave energy may have important implications for offshore floating wind turbines. They're subject to the same harsh marine environments that wave energy machines are, so turbines could benefit. Also it might be possible to add wave energy harvesting to floating wind turbines.
This video explains the different types wave energy converters (WEC), which one failed and succeeded. According to Wanan Sheng, there are 6 challenges in wave technologies : 1) Wave chaotic behavior not simulated during design stage : so, in real conditions, only rare ideal waves will produce energy. 2) Survivality to withstand 100 times normal loading : make it stronger leads to higher cost. Some have an energy limiter and other simply stop working. 3) Large force and low reaction of the PTO (Power Take Off) leading to low conversion efficiency. A heavy PTO doesn't react fast due to its inertia and it doesn't react at all with small waves. 4) Problem of converting wave low motion frequency in to a 50/60 Hz frequency : electronics can help but it is another component prone to fail. 5) Stroke limitation for mechanical PTO such as pistons. This limits the energy collected. 6) Difficulties in engineering implementations. Oscillating Water Column seems the technology that will likely address the challenges 3 to 5 because there are no moving parts in direct contact with waves. Wave Energy Converters by Wanang Sheng : ruclips.net/video/IfraeH16tvg/видео.html I noticed that AI has also jumped into wave energy to double the power output. It should be employed by analyzing WEC design before they failed and waste taxpayer money. Pelamis (red floating cylinders + hydraulic pistons), The Oyster (flap + hydraulic piston), WaveStar (float + arm + piston), WaveBob (Buoy + piston) : they all failed because they harvest wave kinetic energy with a mechanical moving part (which an intuitive design) subject to fatigue and failure. They are also very heavy compared to their power capacity : over 200 ton/MW, it will be difficult to get a competitive LCOE (Levelized Cost of Energy). As there is no official database to record the reasons of failure in details of WEC, we still see the same inefficient technologies coming back under other fancy names. Simple, lightweight and maintainable design are some of the keys to reduce WEC costs and increase the efficiency.
NREL has published some good reference models. I agree that a really good database would be awesome, but it seems that no one funding anyone to properly document the failed ideas in detail. Meanwhile, grants are going to whichever companies make the most ludicrous-but-serious-sounding proposals concerning what another variant of an old idea can do.
I am a recent subscriber and very much enjoy your videos. Have you done any on tidal power? Intuitively it would seem to be much simpler to capture given its flow rather than oscillating dynamics.
What if we can convert the unpredictable motion ex : translation or rotation to stable rotation for the turbine. May this can be solved the wave energy.
Brilliant video as always Rosie! We could be soon reaching the tipping point where the technology becomes viable and adoption skyrockets! Just as long as research centres are powered by wind and solar in the mean time 😉 I was wondering what sort of efficiencies and power levels devices are currently? Will we be seeing GW scale plants any time soon? Is there a also limit to how small it can be scaled? Will we see personal wave energy devices for coastal properties or is solar (and occasionally wind) still set to be the only viable off grid source? Keep up the great work!
I reckon wave energy could be the perfect antidote to seasonal supply/demand fluctuations. Solar produces more in the summer, wind varies continuously throughout the year, and hydro and wave produce more in the winter. Demand is higher in the winter than the summer. Here in the UK, we're making up winter shortfalls - those days and weeks when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing - with fossil fuels, but they can't be used for much longer, neither can a whole season's wind/solar supply shortfall be made up for by long-term energy storage like hydrogen or thermal storage. Wave could be just what we need to keep the lights on (and the we-really-need-to-roll-these-out-soon heat pumps pumping) over the winter. Small proportions of the demand first, then hopefully ramping up alongside some seasonal storage (for the days the waves aren't rolling either) as fossil fuels get ramped down. One more thought, from a professional electronics engineer: might HVDC be a good addition to offshore wind and wave farms? SiC MOSFETs are becoming more common and reliable, but 10kV and higher IGBTs are on the way. Might these be just what we need for efficient, large-scale rectification and inversion? Either that or electrolyse it offshore and feed back hydrogen for whatever you might use it for?
I don't get why hydraulic converters are so popular in wave energy. It's expensive, and in most cases needs quite a lot of maintenance. Converting linear motion into rotational can be done with a rope and a reel, sure you need it to rewind automatically, like a recoil start on a lawn mower, and you might want to smooth the power for the generator with a flywheel, it can still be done extremely simple and efficient compared to hydraulic systems. When most of the global expertise seems to agree that hydraulic systems are better than a reel and a flywheel, I feel I should ask, have I missed something? Using hydraulic systems to turn reciprocating motion in to a smoother rotational motion is practically unique to wave energy, as far as I know, why is it the better option there? Also maybe because of my ignorance, but I think development of wave power generation needs to focus a lot more on cost efficiency over energy efficiency. Make them actually commercially viable, and start to mass produce them, then you'll get resources improve aspects that are in them selves less important, like how many percent of the energy in the waves you can actually turn into useful energy. Another thing that I find interesting, I get the impression that most development of wave power is aimed towards grid connection, from a very early stage. That means it has to compete with wind and solar, and in many cases still, sadly, fossil fuels. Wind had the advantage of being essentially the only practical way to produce renewable power, unless you could build hydro power, for a long time. Solar PV is extremely scalable, it was quite common in small scale, as an alternative to grid connection or battery operation for decades before it became commercially viable for grid power generation. Another problem, where you have a lot of waves, you generally also have a lot of wind, and in most of the world, also a lot of sun, at least in most of the world where you don't have to worry about ice.
@@Froggability Obviously not "impossible", but very much an issue looking at failed wave energy projects, with major breakage and corrosion issues. Wave energy tends to be large structures where waves are powerful, especially during a hurricane, and for good efficiency, they can't be too heavy. Heavy structures also take more energy to produce. And the likely "suboptimal" efficiency also makes payback time longer. Much easier with structures which can afford to be heavy and with mechanics protected from waves.
@@Froggability While it's true that the marine industry has solved all the issues, but the solutions are all very expensive compared to those that can be deployed inland.
I think if you have an idea (for energy tech) you need to prove its potential before anyone will invest in it. A lot of people think that having an idea is the most important part, but there is no shortage of clever-sounding ideas out there. The hard part is getting something to work reliably and economically.
@@EngineeringwithRosie Thanks for the reply. Yes I understand, but this are not an idea anymore. I have build a scale model years ago that work. Dew to the job that I have done, I have work on many factory's all over my country on all types of machinery and I saw new and old, bad and good tech. So I have took all the best working principals for this application and put it together. I did not do it for money . I just want to saw if I can do it, and that feels good. If you want I will draw some pictures again and specs and what type of machinery I have use and send it for you. You can do with it what you want. Throw it away or perfect it and sell it, but it will be a thrill to saw it in a productive stage.
Tidal energy - does water level change away from the shoreline? Use massive floating lids. 5 sided box. Chain them to the sea bed. Put a hole in the top and a wind turbine. When sea level rises the chain holds the structure down and air is pushed out. When water level falls air is sucked in. Problem is these would probably need to be massive islands.
There are obvious problems with working with wave energy. It is extremely powerful which can damage machinery and infrastructure, it is extremely corrosive and it is expensive to install machinery in or on water. The solution to my non-engineer eye is to remove the machinery from contact with the ocean, creating artificial blowholes. Use the pumping action from the waves to pressurise air in pipes leading to land based generators. The bidirectional motion of the water can be converted to single direction airflow with a simple flip valve, to pressurise a chamber that isolates the machinery from the salt and smooths out the wave cycles.
Yeah I tend to agree. After talking to dozens of wave energy experts, and thinking about it for over a year now I think that is the critical obstacle that needs to be overcome. There just seems to be (so far) no good way to have a simple version of a wave energy converter that allows for easy maintenance, with the ability to quickly change aspects that aren't working well, and that can be gradually scaled up/ made more complex to reach the best resources. There is no engineering reason why we couldn't eventually get there, but I am not sure whether there is enough "pull" for the technology to fund the long term development of a device, when we already have lots of cheap wind and solar, and storage is rapidly dropping in price.
@@EngineeringwithRosie. I too thought alot about what could be feasible when I went to remote pacific islands dependent on diesel but pounded by ocean swells. 2 ways seem possible to me, 1/ air column displacement, mimic blow holes with 2 way air turbine. Or 2/ submarine sized bouys sit just below the surface tethered to sea floor connect with hydraulic rams. Incase of a storm descend a little to safe zone and continue to generate. Like all generation plants, around 25% redundancy allows for ongoing maintenance
I just found your channel. I'm really impressed with the quality of your content!
I did a wave energy startup for two years before joining SpaceX. The reason why wave energy is still interesting is that it has the potential to diversify the mixture of renewable energy sources. In a world where renewables make up a significant percentage of the mix, and for the same target level of energy reliability, wind+solar+wave+storage (or a backup) is potentially more cost effective than just wind+solar+storage (or a backup). In the early days, when renewables represented just a sliver of the energy pie chart, the intermittence of wind and solar was not a significant detractor. So, the simplicity of wind and solar won out over wave energy. There's hope that that will change. But wave energy remains hard because of challenges such as corrosion, storm survivability, biofouling, entanglement, marine life factors, and power transmission costs, to name a few.
Thanks so much! I wanted to apply for a job at SpaceX after I finished my PhD, but I wasn't allowed to even apply because I'm not a US citizen, so I can't work for a company with launch tech 😥
I agree that diversifying variable renewable generation sources is the best chance for wave energy. I am really hoping it breaks through, it is very cool technology!
What kind of WEC was your company using, by the way?
@@EngineeringwithRosie We came up with an Oscillating Wave Surge Convertor with all moving parts safely sealed away on the inside and lots of integrated energy storage.
@@EngineeringwithRosie
Please do study of hydrogen (oxygen) enhanced ICE. For the moment let's ignore the cost of hydrogen production. What is gross improvement in ICE power output, if hydrogen is used as an addative to the fuel/air mixture of traditional ICE machine.
Like wise, what happens when oxygen is added to the ICE. And lastly, adding hydrogen gas and oxygen gas to ice air/fuel mixture.
This is a great video. Long on ideas and great conversation. Short on BS and hype. Thank you. I'll share!
Thanks so much, that's a great bit of feedback to receive 😀
In Denmark, several experiments have been made, so far they show the sea has more forces than you can design for.
Thank you. Denmark seems to have an obvious answer.
I'm here after the Blackbird video. And now I'm subscribed! I would love to see wave energy become economical and scalable.
Very nice video! Much better than the earlier two in the series. Thanks!
Amazing quality work in the video ❤❤
Cheers Rosie, very interesting 👍.
Glad you enjoyed it 😊
Now I want to know more about wave energy harvesting techniques. I'll have to watch your series.
An excellent video. I agree that the challenge with WEC is that the energy density of wavesis 10-100x greater than wind; It means WECs have to be so much heftier
Very nice commentary, and you see the word "economic" crop up over and over. "Economic" is, above-all, the make or break aspect to all WEC devices. I have been exploring WEC since the 1970s, most specifically as a hobby, because..... you see spectacular shortfalls, such as the Islay Limpet in Scotland, or the Pelamis project off Spain, and you don't wish to promise much and end up with basically a non-viable design and a bunch of people (and family) whose money you have flushed into bubbles, eternally angry with you.
So I advocate and explore possible WECs, point absorbers, over-topping, buoyancy devices with tides, etc.
I especially remember the Islay Limpet, and its simplicity and one moving part, the bi-directional air turbine. The device produced, day and night, only ONE-TENTH the electricity output that engineers had calculated. ONE-TENTH (
I have a question that is sort of in the same direction based on the need for storing renewable energy: That is wind and solar, hydro do just fine. :-)
Why not use large air compressors instead of generator when building windmill parks. Storing the air and running a large generatur at a constant load.
Used together with a cooling loop that catch the heat generated in the compression cycle the efficency should be fearly good.
Advantages using this type as system, when storing is include, should be:
- Reduced cost, since a large compressor is cheaper then a large generator.
- Reduced enery loss from converting between energy types.
- Reduced storage cost, since a large tank is cheaper then a large battery.
- Reduced complexity, since an advanced gearing system is not need. The output do not need to be synchronize at 50 or 60 Hz.
- Reduced impact on the environment since a lot less copper and rare earth minerals will be needed.
- More stable since just a few large generator run at constant load can be used to generate electricity when needed.
It would be interesting to se a video with pro and cons for a solution like this.
You've just (kind of) reinvented compressed air energy storage. Look it up if you haven't already, it's a very interesting technology that we arguably should be deploying more widely
@@gigabyte2248 You did not get that the point is not the metode of storage, but how we fill and use it.
To generate electricity to run a compressor wast a lot of energy, and large generator are very complex and expensive. Large compressors are less complex, cheaper and last longer. Added heat capture also make thing much more efficent.
Also I have studied just about any type of large scale use of compressed air as storage.
A thought:
The research done on wave energy may have important implications for offshore floating wind turbines. They're subject to the same harsh marine environments that wave energy machines are, so turbines could benefit. Also it might be possible to add wave energy harvesting to floating wind turbines.
This video explains the different types wave energy converters (WEC), which one failed and succeeded.
According to Wanan Sheng, there are 6 challenges in wave technologies :
1) Wave chaotic behavior not simulated during design stage : so, in real conditions, only rare ideal waves will produce energy.
2) Survivality to withstand 100 times normal loading : make it stronger leads to higher cost. Some have an energy limiter and other simply stop working.
3) Large force and low reaction of the PTO (Power Take Off) leading to low conversion efficiency. A heavy PTO doesn't react fast due to its inertia and it doesn't react at all with small waves.
4) Problem of converting wave low motion frequency in to a 50/60 Hz frequency : electronics can help but it is another component prone to fail.
5) Stroke limitation for mechanical PTO such as pistons. This limits the energy collected.
6) Difficulties in engineering implementations.
Oscillating Water Column seems the technology that will likely address the challenges 3 to 5 because there are no moving parts in direct contact with waves.
Wave Energy Converters by Wanang Sheng : ruclips.net/video/IfraeH16tvg/видео.html
I noticed that AI has also jumped into wave energy to double the power output.
It should be employed by analyzing WEC design before they failed and waste taxpayer money.
Pelamis (red floating cylinders + hydraulic pistons), The Oyster (flap + hydraulic piston), WaveStar (float + arm + piston), WaveBob (Buoy + piston) : they all failed because they harvest wave kinetic energy with a mechanical moving part (which an intuitive design) subject to fatigue and failure.
They are also very heavy compared to their power capacity : over 200 ton/MW, it will be difficult to get a competitive LCOE (Levelized Cost of Energy).
As there is no official database to record the reasons of failure in details of WEC, we still see the same inefficient technologies coming back under other fancy names.
Simple, lightweight and maintainable design are some of the keys to reduce WEC costs and increase the efficiency.
Really good points, thanks for commenting.
NREL has published some good reference models. I agree that a really good database would be awesome, but it seems that no one funding anyone to properly document the failed ideas in detail. Meanwhile, grants are going to whichever companies make the most ludicrous-but-serious-sounding proposals concerning what another variant of an old idea can do.
Thank you so much for this informative comment! It really helped me understand what they're talking about in the video.
Thank you for this video! It's very interesting, and it asks and answers some good questions.
I am a recent subscriber and very much enjoy your videos. Have you done any on tidal power? Intuitively it would seem to be much simpler to capture given its flow rather than oscillating dynamics.
What if we can convert the unpredictable motion ex : translation or rotation to stable rotation for the turbine. May this can be solved the wave energy.
Brilliant video as always Rosie! We could be soon reaching the tipping point where the technology becomes viable and adoption skyrockets! Just as long as research centres are powered by wind and solar in the mean time 😉 I was wondering what sort of efficiencies and power levels devices are currently? Will we be seeing GW scale plants any time soon? Is there a also limit to how small it can be scaled? Will we see personal wave energy devices for coastal properties or is solar (and occasionally wind) still set to be the only viable off grid source?
Keep up the great work!
Great questions and I'll make sure to cover them in the last couple of videos!
I reckon wave energy could be the perfect antidote to seasonal supply/demand fluctuations. Solar produces more in the summer, wind varies continuously throughout the year, and hydro and wave produce more in the winter. Demand is higher in the winter than the summer. Here in the UK, we're making up winter shortfalls - those days and weeks when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing - with fossil fuels, but they can't be used for much longer, neither can a whole season's wind/solar supply shortfall be made up for by long-term energy storage like hydrogen or thermal storage. Wave could be just what we need to keep the lights on (and the we-really-need-to-roll-these-out-soon heat pumps pumping) over the winter. Small proportions of the demand first, then hopefully ramping up alongside some seasonal storage (for the days the waves aren't rolling either) as fossil fuels get ramped down.
One more thought, from a professional electronics engineer: might HVDC be a good addition to offshore wind and wave farms? SiC MOSFETs are becoming more common and reliable, but 10kV and higher IGBTs are on the way. Might these be just what we need for efficient, large-scale rectification and inversion? Either that or electrolyse it offshore and feed back hydrogen for whatever you might use it for?
Very good. An idea: Use a “wall” for storms to trap high density power storms. Relatively static,
Few moving parts.
The longer and bigger the wall, the more energy produced
I don't get why hydraulic converters are so popular in wave energy. It's expensive, and in most cases needs quite a lot of maintenance.
Converting linear motion into rotational can be done with a rope and a reel, sure you need it to rewind automatically, like a recoil start on a lawn mower, and you might want to smooth the power for the generator with a flywheel, it can still be done extremely simple and efficient compared to hydraulic systems.
When most of the global expertise seems to agree that hydraulic systems are better than a reel and a flywheel, I feel I should ask, have I missed something? Using hydraulic systems to turn reciprocating motion in to a smoother rotational motion is practically unique to wave energy, as far as I know, why is it the better option there?
Also maybe because of my ignorance, but I think development of wave power generation needs to focus a lot more on cost efficiency over energy efficiency. Make them actually commercially viable, and start to mass produce them, then you'll get resources improve aspects that are in them selves less important, like how many percent of the energy in the waves you can actually turn into useful energy.
Another thing that I find interesting, I get the impression that most development of wave power is aimed towards grid connection, from a very early stage. That means it has to compete with wind and solar, and in many cases still, sadly, fossil fuels. Wind had the advantage of being essentially the only practical way to produce renewable power, unless you could build hydro power, for a long time. Solar PV is extremely scalable, it was quite common in small scale, as an alternative to grid connection or battery operation for decades before it became commercially viable for grid power generation. Another problem, where you have a lot of waves, you generally also have a lot of wind, and in most of the world, also a lot of sun, at least in most of the world where you don't have to worry about ice.
One major issue I'm seeing with wave energy projects is making the hardware last in the rough surroundings. Salt and mechanics is a bad combo.
Yes, and...
Salt and electricity is even worse.
But not impossible, the marine industry is huge and such issues are really a non issue
@@Froggability Obviously not "impossible", but very much an issue looking at failed wave energy projects, with major breakage and corrosion issues. Wave energy tends to be large structures where waves are powerful, especially during a hurricane, and for good efficiency, they can't be too heavy. Heavy structures also take more energy to produce. And the likely "suboptimal" efficiency also makes payback time longer. Much easier with structures which can afford to be heavy and with mechanics protected from waves.
@@Froggability While it's true that the marine industry has solved all the issues, but the solutions are all very expensive compared to those that can be deployed inland.
now if some one have an idea of a new wave energy way, who will listen ?
I think if you have an idea (for energy tech) you need to prove its potential before anyone will invest in it. A lot of people think that having an idea is the most important part, but there is no shortage of clever-sounding ideas out there. The hard part is getting something to work reliably and economically.
@@EngineeringwithRosie Thanks for the reply. Yes I understand, but this are not an idea anymore. I have build a scale model years ago that work. Dew to the job that I have done, I have work on many factory's all over my country on all types of machinery and I saw new and old, bad and good tech. So I have took all the best working principals for this application and put it together. I did not do it for money . I just want to saw if I can do it, and that feels good. If you want I will draw some pictures again and specs and what type of machinery I have use and send it for you. You can do with it what you want. Throw it away or perfect it and sell it, but it will be a thrill to saw it in a productive stage.
Adi Kurniawan, Indonesian's name :D
State Oregon put a lot $$$ in some kind buye .
Any result or simple waste money by government officials??
采能方式至关重要，关系到商产项目的成败。
Tidal energy - does water level change away from the shoreline? Use massive floating lids. 5 sided box. Chain them to the sea bed. Put a hole in the top and a wind turbine. When sea level rises the chain holds the structure down and air is pushed out. When water level falls air is sucked in. Problem is these would probably need to be massive islands.
There are obvious problems with working with wave energy.
It is extremely powerful which can damage machinery and infrastructure, it is extremely corrosive and it is expensive to install machinery in or on water.
The solution to my non-engineer eye is to remove the machinery from contact with the ocean, creating artificial blowholes.
Use the pumping action from the waves to pressurise air in pipes leading to land based generators. The bidirectional motion of the water can be converted to single direction airflow with a simple flip valve, to pressurise a chamber that isolates the machinery from the salt and smooths out the wave cycles.
If your device is free flouting like a fish or a ship closed ,they should survive an extreme event.
First priority: reliability.
Not efficiency, not complexity.
Even coal and fuel power plants learned that over 120 years ago
Yeah I tend to agree. After talking to dozens of wave energy experts, and thinking about it for over a year now I think that is the critical obstacle that needs to be overcome. There just seems to be (so far) no good way to have a simple version of a wave energy converter that allows for easy maintenance, with the ability to quickly change aspects that aren't working well, and that can be gradually scaled up/ made more complex to reach the best resources. There is no engineering reason why we couldn't eventually get there, but I am not sure whether there is enough "pull" for the technology to fund the long term development of a device, when we already have lots of cheap wind and solar, and storage is rapidly dropping in price.
@@EngineeringwithRosie. I too thought alot about what could be feasible when I went to remote pacific islands dependent on diesel but pounded by ocean swells.
2 ways seem possible to me,
1/ air column displacement, mimic blow holes with 2 way air turbine. Or
2/ submarine sized bouys sit just below the surface tethered to sea floor connect with hydraulic rams. Incase of a storm descend a little to safe zone and continue to generate.
Like all generation plants, around 25% redundancy allows for ongoing maintenance
Forget wave energy. Focus on water current