EDINBURGH, Scotland -- Pelamis platurus, otherwise known as the Yellowbelly Sea Snake, has a new mechanical namesake, a flexible 180-meter monster -- nearly the length of two football fields. It is floating here next to a dock, ready to go to sea.

The giant red machine is named after the serpent, one of the few known to thrive in the open sea. The device is designed so that when it's hit by big waves, it writhes snake-like in the water. As it does, its hydraulic pistons move back and forth. They power its generators to produce a rated 750 kilowatts of electricity.

Pelamis is the second generation of "wave energy converters" designed by Pelamis Wave Power Ltd. After some rough sailing, it is beginning to catch on. The machine in the water was ordered and is now owned by giant German power utility E.ON. Another is under order by Scottish Power, and an array of other investors are interested in the product. Still, the company admits, there is much work left to be done.

"We started on a hand-to-mouth basis, and essentially, we are still operating like that," business development director Max Carcas told ClimateWire on a gray and rainy day in the company's sparse offices in a cavernous building here, formerly used to manufacture generators.

But right opposite from where the Pelamis machine is moored is the visible reason why its clean power is seeing rising demand. There are great mounds of imported coal being loaded onto rail cars for shipment to a local power station to be burned and release thousands of tons of climate-changing carbon into the atmosphere.

"That," said Carcas wryly, "is our competition. Romanian coal."

It is never easy to take an untried idea and make it commercial. When the technology is cutting-edge, the environment in which it will operate is unforgiving. The payback is commercially uncertain, although the project is morally praiseworthy. And the gulf between political rhetoric and financial reality is often vast.

Pelamis is the brainchild of three engineers -- Richard Yemm, who is now the company's chief technical officer, Chris Retzler and Dave Pizer. When they founded the company in 1998, they had between them some 40 years of experience in hydraulics and engineering.

Simple concept, complex engineering
The concept is both simple and highly complex, with the new machines consisting of five segments hinged together in line astern, each segment containing a generator. Running between each segment are the hydraulic pistons. As the snake, which is moored by the nose to let it turn into the waves, undulates with the sea movement, so the pistons operate and the electricity flows.

"In the second-generation machines, the segments can also flex from side to side, so we can capture more of the wave power, and that can all be fine-tuned from ashore according to the sea conditions," explained Carcas.

Initially working out of a small apartment and eking out an existence, Yemm had to sell a system he had devised to damp vibrations in wind turbine blades in order to raise seed money.

Using this and his somewhat burdened credit card to move forward with design and wave-tank testing of Pelamis models, they also took advantage of U.K. government support to scrape together enough cash in 2001 to keep the company going for six months and to build a one-seventh scale working model that they put in the water in Scotland's Firth of Forth.

This now-dismantled 20-meter-long (21.9-yard-long) prototype still sits gathering dust in a shed next to where its giant second-generation descendant lies bobbing gently on the tide. But the prototype helped the team raise its first venture capital -- £7.5 million from four investors. In 2004, they built the first full-scale machine, which was 120 meters (131.23 yards) long and had a diameter of 3.5 meters (3.83 yards).

7 Comments

1. 1. gunslingor 04:01 PM 6/3/10

   Nice, get these babies up to 5MWs ASAP and Roll them out already!!!

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2. 2. dwbd 11:47 PM 6/3/10

   David Mackay thoroughly analyzed Wave Power for Britain, which has one of the best wave resources of any nation, in his paper Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air. His conclusion, by covering half of Britain''s coastline with really efficient Wave Generators, you might get maximum 4 kwh/day per person vs the 195 kwh/day that the average Britain uses or the 260 kwh/day the average American uses (total energy consumption per capita). He admits that is really optimistic. Using the real world Pelamis wave generator that's reduced to 1.2 kwh/day per person. And uses 1000 kg steel per avg kw, vs offshore Wind of 510 kg steel per avg kw, and Old Nuclear uses 40 kg steel per avg kw. A solid, sobering analysis of the Pelamis Wave Energy generator here:
   
   http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/10/25/tcase5/
   
   "...The annual output of an AP1000 nuclear reactor rated at 1,154 MWe and run at 92% capacity factor would be 9,300 GWh. So, going by the manufacturer’s data, we would need to deploy 3,450 Pelamis machines to generate the equivalent yearly energy of one AP1000, arranged in an array 0.6 km wide and extending along 180 km of high-energy coastline. (Note that these are projected, not measured figures - the real world is often tougher)..."

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3. 3. IMPORTER50 06:36 PM 6/4/10

   Harvesting expending energy from the worlds largest man made power source
   What is the greatest waste of man made expending energy on the planet today? AUTOMOTIVE VEHICLES How can we more efficiently HARVEST the energy currently being expended? Building Vehicle Energy Harvester (VEH)/(A Lead-Free Piezoelectric Device)
   How it works
   The system is based on the scientific principle that mechanical movement can be converted to electricity. The visible surface of the VEH is a rectangular unit (8 inches deep by 7 feet wide), flush with the roads surface, running from one side of the lane to the other. The surface of the unit is made of a thick industrial grade non-skid rubber, it is flush with the road, in the front and back, and elevated 1 inch in the center by a 3/4 wide steel bar running underneath the 7 ft wide rubber section. The rubber is bordered on all sides by a heavy duty non-skid steel frame (2 inches wide on all sides), looking similar to a green light traffic trigger seen at traffic light intersections. Simply put, as the vehicles tires run over the VEH, the weight of the vehicle, drives the steel bar in a downward motion, like an engine piston, the downward/linear motion of the piston is converted into rotational motion by the crankshaft via a connecting rod, ultimately, spinning the crankshaft at 2000-4000 rpms. On busy highways, with thousands of cars running over the units at 65 mph, during certain periods of the day and night, the amount of electricity created by each VEH would be phenomenal. Heavy duty electrical cables would be used to connect the VEH to either the local power grid or individual power stations for local distribution. The next question, Is this electricity free? In the beginning, the VEHs might have to be located under roadways that have a downward incline. If they are, this energy source could be considered free due to the use of the gravity effect causing additional momentum from the downward incline vs. a flat or upwardly inclining road, which would require the vehicles to expend a very small amount of additional energy to get over the elevated section, and would therefore add COST to the system. (even though that cost is a fraction of a cent, it must be considered, from a legal standpoint). How this viewpoint is finally resolved will be the issue.
   The potential electricity created with zero ADDITIONAL EMISSIONS could help provide a large portion of the world with a whole new source of energy. It could also provoke new ways of thinking, regarding alternative energy.

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4. 4. Mr. Sol Biderman 07:05 PM 6/4/10

   Brilliant. The company can obtain auxiliary revenues by charging admission to the wave farm information center.
   Mr. Sol Biderman

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5. 5. sanoran 06:37 PM 6/7/10

   Sadly, another unrealistic idea. Energy is still cheap, and producing, hauling, installing, etc of these devices is going to be far more expensive when energy is not cheap. So yes, these and similar machines like windmills will indeed produce electricity, but they will never come even close to replacing Oil.
   
   The energy density of oil, combined with ease of transport makes it the only energy that humans can really utilize and make wealth out of thin-air. Everything else is just a 'project'.
   
   This is definitely innovative and interesting, but completely irrelevant in terms replacing Oil/Natural Gas as a source of energy.

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6. 6. leggedfish 08:00 AM 6/10/10

   The nice thing about this idea is that the "snakes" theoretically should be able to be unmoored and moved in the event of a hurricane, and will avoid getting damaged, unlike immobile offshore wind turbines.

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7. 7. Sisko 05:53 PM 6/14/10

   dwbd's comments and analysis seems well stated. This seems to be yet another idea that will not actually be commerically viable.

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