This is so cool: Wave Power Plant

[catbyte]

Link to tweet

Ocean Waves can be a source of unlimited energy.

This Wave Power Plant, at full capacity, will produce 87 gigawatts of power.

A single gigawatt can power over 300,000 homes.

[Fla Dem]

1. There may actually be hope for the future.

[rurallib]

2. thanks so much for telling us what a gigawatt can power

often posts like this leave a person hanging.

That is a hell of a lot of energy. They look to be fairly unharmful for the environment.

[caraher]

3. The tweet is riddled with inaccuracies

First, "unlimited" energy is a crazy claim.

Second, "The Wave Power Plant" shown will never produce 87 GW of power. What you see is a 50 kW prototype, which means it produces less than one millionth of 87 gigawatts.

Third, the 87 GW figure, isn't explained anyplace I've found. My guess is that it comes from taking the length of Brazil's coastline and imagining lining the entire coast with these devices. That seems broadly consistent with David MacKay's quick analysis of wave power for Great Britain, which says wave energy on their coastline is about 40 kW per meter, which, over the length of their 1000 km coastline, would work out to 40 GW of wave energy. This isn't electricity, it's just the mechanical energy of the waves. Assuming Britain lined a quarter of the coast with wave energy devices and working with some generous assumptions about efficiency, he estimates wave power could supply a few percent of Britain's demand for energy.

So... it's an energy source worth looking into, but this tweet paints a picture of the potential that is misleading.

Hmmm. This doesn't read like a Lounge post... so be it!

[miyazaki]

4. If that thing could produce 87 GW

so could I on my seesaw with my dog.