An OE Buoy or Ocean Energy Buoy is a wave power device that uses an Oscillating Water Column design. It was deployed in half-scale test mode in Spiddal near Galway in Ireland for over two years between 2007 and 2009. As of the 5th of March 2011 the model has been redeployed at the same site, primarily as a data collector for the EU funded Cores Project.
Wave power is the capture of energy of wind waves to do useful work – for example, electricity generation, water desalination, or pumping water. A machine that exploits wave power is a wave energy converter (WEC).
Spiddal is a village on the shore of Galway Bay in County Galway, Ireland. It is 18 kilometres (11 mi) west of Galway city, on the R336 road. Spiddal is on the eastern side of the county's Gaeltacht and of the Connemara region. It is a centre for tourism with a scenic beach, harbour and shore fishing. The village is part of the civil parish of Moycullen.
It was developed by the HMRC in Cork and is now owned and developed by the spun off Oceanenergy.
The OE Buoy is a version of a device known as the Backward Bent Duct Buoy (BBDB) which was invented in 1986 by wave energy pioneer and Japanese naval commander Yoshio Masuda.
Yoshio Masuda was a former Japanese naval commander, regarded as the father of modern wave power technology. Among other devices, the now used principle of Oscillating Water Column is regarded as his invention. It was initially used for small-scale navigation buoys.
This page is based on this
Wikipedia article Text is available under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
A buoy is a floating device that can have many purposes. It can be anchored (stationary) or allowed to drift with ocean currents. The etymology of the word is disputed.
The Pelamis Wave Energy Converter was a technology that used the motion of ocean surface waves to create electricity. The machine was made up of connected sections which flex and bend as waves pass; it is this motion which is used to generate electricity.
The National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) was established in November 1993 as an autonomous society under the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India. NIOT is managed by a Governing Council and the Director is the head of the Institute. The institute is based in Chennai.
A wave farm – or wave power farm or wave energy park – is a collection of machines in the same location and used for the generation of wave power electricity. Wave farms can be either offshore or nearshore, with the former the most promising for the production of large quantities of electricity for the grid. The first wave farm was constructed in Portugal, the Aguçadoura Wave Farm, consisting of three Pelamis machines. The world's largest is planned for Scotland.
The Wave Hub is a wave power research project. The project is developed approximately 10 miles (16 km) off Hayle, on the north coast of Cornwall, United Kingdom. The hub was installed on the seabed in September 2010,
and is a 'socket' sitting on the seabed for wave energy converters to be plugged into. It will have connections to it from arrays of up to four kinds of wave energy converter. A cable from the hub to main land will take electrical power from the devices to the electric grid. The total capacity of the hub will be 20 MWe. The estimated cost of the project is £28 million.
CETO is a wave-energy technology that converts kinetic energy from ocean swell into electrical power and directly desalinates freshwater through reverse osmosis. The technology was developed and tested onshore and offshore in Fremantle, Western Australia. In early 2015 a CETO 5 production installation was commissioned and connected to the grid. As of January 2016 all the electricity generated is being purchased to contribute towards the power requirements of HMAS Stirling naval base at Garden Island, Western Australia. Some of the energy will also be used directly to desalinate water.
The European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) Ltd is a UKAS accredited test and research centre focusing on wave and tidal power development based in the Orkney Islands, UK. The Centre provides developers with the opportunity to test full-scale grid-connected prototype devices in unrivalled wave and tidal conditions. The operations are spread over five sites:
Pelamis Wave Power designed and manufactured the Pelamis Wave Energy Converter – a technology that uses the motion of ocean surface waves to create electricity. The company was established in 1998 and had offices and fabrication facilities in Leith Docks, Edinburgh, Scotland. It went into administration in November 2014.
Ocean Power Technologies (O.P.T.) is a US-owned renewable energy company, providing power generation devices, services and related equipment for the extraction of energy from ocean waves. The company's PowerBuoy technology is scalable to hundreds of megawatts and the generated energy from Wave Power is supplied to the grid via submarine cables. Projects are now underway around the world.
Evopod is a unique tidal energy device being developed by a UK-based company Oceanflow Energy Ltd for generating electricity from tidal streams and ocean currents. It can operate in exposed deep water sites where severe wind and waves also make up the environment.
Marine energy or marine power refers to the energy carried by ocean waves, tides, salinity, and ocean temperature differences. The movement of water in the world’s oceans creates a vast store of kinetic energy, or energy in motion. Some of this energy can be harnessed to generate electricity to power homes, transport and industries.
The Lysekil project is an ongoing wave power project which is run by the Centre for Renewable Electric Energy Conversion at Uppsala University in Sweden.
SDE Sea Wave Power Plant is a type of renewable energy power plant utilizing sea wave energy for the production of electricity.
A tidal stream generator, often referred to as a tidal energy converter (TEC), is a machine that extracts energy from moving masses of water, in particular tides, although the term is often used in reference to machines designed to extract energy from run of river or tidal estuarine sites. Certain types of these machines function very much like underwater wind turbines, and are thus often referred to as tidal turbines. They were first conceived in the 1970s during the oil crisis.
Wave power in the United States is under development in several locations off the east and west coasts as well as Hawaii. It has moved beyond the research phase and is producing reliable energy for the Grid. Its use to-date has been for situations where other forms of energy production are not economically viable and as such, the power output is currently modest. But major installations are planned to come on-line within the next few years.
Oscillating water columns (OWCs) are a type of Wave Energy Converter (WEC) that harness energy from the oscillation of the seawater inside a chamber or hollow caused by the action of waves. OWCs have shown promise as a renewable energy source with low environmental impact. Because of this, multiple companies have been working to design increasingly efficient OWC models.
OWC are devices with a semi-submerged chamber or hollow open to the sea below, keeping a trapped air pocket above a water column. Waves force the column to act like a piston, moving up and down, forcing the air out of the chamber and back into it. This continuous movement force a bidirectional stream of high-velocity air, which is channelled through a Power-Take-Off (PTO). The PTO system converts the airflow into energy. In models that convert airflow to electricity, the PTO system consists of a bidirectional turbine. This means that the turbine always spins the same direction regardless of the direction of airflow, allowing for energy to be continuously generated. Both the collecting chamber and PTO systems will be explained further under "Basic OWC Components."
MARMOK-A-5 is an offshore electrical power generator that uses wave energy to create electricity. This device is a spar buoy installed in the maritime testing site Bimep, in the Bay of Biscay. It is the first grid connected maritime generator in Spain, and one of the first in the word.
