Wave for the camera

Or the washing machine. Or the stereo. Or the lights.

For some time, people have been talking about using the oceans to produce environmentally-friendly electricity by harnessing the power either of the tides or the waves. Now it looks as though commercial wave power may be about to happen. From AP for May 21:

A pioneering commercial wave power plant, producing clean and renewable energy, is to go on line off Portugal in 2006, after a contract was signed this week, project partners announced Friday. ...

The power generators, like giant, orange sausages floating on water, will use wave motion to produce electricity by pumping high-pressure fluids to motors, Norsk Hydro AS said. The Norwegian energy company is a major backer of the project.

The first phase of the project is intended to produce electricity equivalent to the amount used by 1500 Portuguese homes. If successful, the project, using generators developed by a company in Scotland, will be ramped up ten-fold.

However, this sort of large-scale project is not the only - nor even necessarily the best - way to go. The Schumacher Institute in the UK and the Schumacher Society in the US, drawing on the works of E. F. Schumacher (author of the book Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered) try to make that point by promoting community-level economics and the important idea of "appropriate level technology."

Spectrum, the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (usually known simply as IEEE or I-triple-E), reports on what can be considered a clear example of that idea.

Generating electricity from wave power is an old idea that gained new life when the quest for alternative energy sources began in the 1970s. Now 17-year-old Aaron Goldin has found an elegant way to do the job with a buoy, a gyroscope, and a generator. ...

The fruit of his labor, the "Autonomous Gyroscopic Ocean-Wave-Powered Generator," is cobbled together from parts scavenged from an old tape recorder and other household appliances.

The result, dubbed Gyro-Gen, achieves efficiency through simplicity. When wave motion causes the buoy in which the device is encased to roll, gyroscopic precession causes the disk in the gyroscope to rotate. The disk turns a crank on a generator.... Goldin points out that, unlike several other wave-power devices now being tested, his requires no hydraulics or other intermediate system to transfer power to the generator.

The device only delivers about 3 watts of power, but that's enough to

charge a battery or electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen that could be stored for later use in a fuel cell. But Goldin's main hope is to develop a scaled-up version that will yield a kilowatt.

Again, without the need for hydraulics of the sort necessary for the large-scale version being planned for off Portugal. So not much power but it's simplicity (and likely far lower cost) could well make it a much better choice for coastal communities in Africa and Asia that couldn't afford (or, at least at present, make use of the delivered power of) large-scale generation.

How good is his idea? Good enough to have won the $100,000 grand prize in the Siemens-Westinghouse Competition in Math, Science & Technology.

Footnote: Speaking of fuel cells, Reuters said this past Friday that

[a] small British technology company has claimed it is on the verge of unlocking the vast potential of fuel cells as a commercially viable source of green energy.

Cambridge-based CMR Fuel Cells said it had made a breakthrough with a new design of fuel cell that is a 10th of the size of existing models and small enough to replace conventional batteries in laptop computers. ...

CMR said the new design would run for four times longer than conventional batteries in a laptop or other devices like power tools.

"It's also instantly rechargeable," said Michael Priestnall, CMR's chief technology officer.

Fuel cells, which produce energy via chemical reactions with a hypothetical efficiency (emphasis on hypothetical) approaching 100%, have long been another hope for environmentally-friendly energy but one that has yet to even vaguely approach its claimed potential. But CMR claims its new design is to older ones as integrated circuits were to transistors. While I certainly suspect that's PR hyperbole, I still can hope it's true. We'll just have to see if the cake is as good as the recipe sounds.