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Floaters Turns Ocean Waves into Renewable Energy
- jjgreen 4y ago"Floater" has a rather different common meaning in the UK (hint, you swim away from them).
- stareatgoats 4y agoThis is not about that kind of floater, and this is not Reddit last time I looked.
- timonoko 4y agoThese are always so weird. Massive structures with few moving parts. Imagine 10 km long flexible tube floating on ocean surface. They have one-way valves for every 10 meters. The tube sucks in water and as waves roll along, the pressure rises and on the coast a simple turbine harvests this energy. Imagine thousands of these tubes along British coast.
- timonoko 4y agoFurther analysis of this ad-hoc idea failed. You cannot gain pressure difference larger than the wave height. Solution: the tube gets wider and wider and we gain volume instead of pressure.
- stareatgoats 4y agoWave energy is massively underutilized and underexplored IMO. This (in the linked article) seems like a relative simple and robust way to harvest it when the geography permits, with all the installation and maintenance directly accessible from land. There are no doubt other techniques that might scale better, but one doesn't have to exclude the other.