4 ms·

that's cool and all, but if they are already anchored, why not have winches that drag one side more than the other to position the arrays towards the sun, inste

• pencilguin 4y ago
  People always seem to jump to the the most complicated and expensive design alternatives. A central pivot and a loop of rope around a motor capstan on-shore to gradually rotate the whole array would be obviously simpler and cheaper. The extreme for preferring absurd complication seems especially to show up in attempts at extracting wave energy. So, wave energy startups almost always fail; not because the energy is insufficient or hard to extract, but just because they seem compelled to field doomed, overpriced, expensive, and fragile designs. I sometimes wonder if you need to have foolishly complicated tech to impress investors, who would be disinclined to fund what they feel like they could understand. Generally, if you are putting stuff out in the water, apparatus that might need servicing should be onshore, with the simplest possible connection out to stuff in the water. For wave energy collection, make your collectors suck air out of a big, shared pipe from shore, with a turbine in the inlet onshore. You don't want your expensive, fragile turbine attacked by salt water and crashing waves, and you don't want lots of little ones where one big, shared one does better. Apparatus to collect wave energy should be always under the surface, away from crashing surface waves.