Has Wave Energy finally come of age?
Wave energy has had many false dawns. But now a company from Finland has a working 2MW prototype up and running in Portugal. Has wave power finally been cracked?
Wave energy is generated by using the power as a wave rolls towards shore to spin a turbine or pump hydraulic pistons. The energy is determined by wave speed, wave height, and the ‘fetch’ — the distance over which the wave has travelled. The larger the ocean, the greater the potential for speed and fetch — and given that Portugal has the entire Atlantic ocean between its coastline and the Americas, the fetch is pretty good.
“There are several different types of wave technology”, explains Chris Ridgewell, CEO of AW-Energy, the Finnish company behind the WaveRoller. He was a naval architect and marine engineer working in liquefied natural gas (LNG) before joining the company as chief technology officer in 2014, and taking over the CEO reins in 2018. “There’s floating ones that bob up and down, things on the shore that take water in and drain it out again. Instead, the WaveRoller is fixed and hinged to the seabed, only about 10 metres deep, using the back-and-forth motion of the wave swell. This surge phenomenon drives across the…
