Comments on: British Wave Hub Gets The Go Ahead

By: Energy Saving

Energy Saving — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:53:15 +0000

I think it is a good adea and like Naib mentioned that much money is a drop in the ocean – no pun intended! But what i think we need to focus on is how we can get large multi national companies to reduce their energy waste and carbon emissions.

What we need to do is actually get the organisations to employ energy saving techniques. If we can do this then we are half way there but at the moment it is still viewed as an avoidable cost.

By: Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog » Generating Electricity from the Ocean

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 23:12:13 +0000

[...] British Wave Hub Gets The Go Ahead The innovative (and controversial) UK “wave hub“, in essence a giant plug on the ocean floor, has received approval. The UK government has will install this plug to allow wave power companies to feed energy back into the grid. The £28 million ($56.5 million) project has cleared the last major regulatory hurdle and will begin construction soon. … Wave and tidal power could provide 3 percent of Britain’s electricity by 2020, according to the government-backed Carbon Trust. The installation is expected to generate up to 20 megawatts of energy, enough to power 7,500 homes and eliminate 300,000 tonnes of CO2 over 25 years. Four companies have already been selected to build projects at the hub. [...]

By: The Naib

The Naib — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 18:47:05 +0000

I guess the point I was making is that 56 million is like the interest on how much we owe china in a couple of hours. We could easily spend a couple hundred million dollars on something like this without any trouble.

Yet we waste billions upon billions of dollars in Iraq, blowing people up and getting people killed. The only reason that seems to make any sort of sense is that we are doing it for oil, so I guess factor that cost into the price you pay at the pump and this seems like an even better deal.

By: cfw

cfw — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 18:21:25 +0000

Minor investment if it is someone else’s money, eh? How many millions (out the door, including the wave tapping devices) need to be spent to power how many homes? How does the cost efficiency compare to say nuclear plants?

I suspect the wave power plant will need (a) stainless steel all over to deal with a harsh environment and (b) lots of upkeep/adjustment/maintenance over the life of the project.

If we spend $80 to get $100 of power, compared to $20 for $100 of power with a nuke plant, are we going astray with wave power?

OK as an experiment, but let’s not go hog-wild yet.