Wave Energy Concept

From this article on wave energy: A U.S. Navy test site off Oahu is now home to the world’s largest-capacity wave energy device, the Ocean Energy 35. 

Unlike many wave power generators, the OE35 design collects energy by pumping air through a turbine mounted above the water, with no moving parts below the surface.  The device is a monolithic barge weighing 825 tonnes and measuring about 125 feet by 60. 

The first at-sea testing for the buoy design began in 2006 with a 1:4 scale device, and developer OceanEnergy partnered with Portland-based shipbuilder Vigor Industrial to manufacture the full-scale unit in 2018-19. It is expected that the OE35 will generate about 1.25-1.75 megawatts of power, about one-tenth the capacity of a GE Haliade-X wind turbine. 

I’m certainly not an expert on wave energy; in fact, they only thing I know about the entire subject is that, over the years, I’ve seen and reported on at least a dozen different concepts for extracting the kinetic energy out of ocean waves and converting it into electricity, and not a single one is commercially viable at this point.  I surmise that this is, at least in part, due to the plummeting prices of solar and wind that have made competitive renewable energy approaches relatively unattractive.

What I can tell you is that 825 tons of steel seems like a very poor starting point for something that needs to be made inexpensively and without a huge carbon footprint of its own. As mentioned above, GE’s Haliade-X wind turbine delivers 10 times more power, and its three blades weigh a total of 105 tons.