Ireland eyes the power of its rough seas

Fierce, unforgiving seas surround Ireland's shores. And they could prove to be a serious money-maker, not to mention an opportunity for innovation in alternative energy.

The government, university research departments, and a growing number of entrepreneurs are collaborating to tap the power and resources of the ocean. Wavebob and Ocean Energy, for instance, have installed wave power prototypes in Galway Bay and will experiment with larger prototypes in an energy park being created just to the north, off the coast of county Mayo.

By 2012, the government aspires to harvest 75 megawatts from waves and by 2020 to raise that energy production to 500 megawatts. It also wants to export services and equipment.

"We have the best wave resources on the planet. We also have a maritime tradition. Understanding how things work at sea, or how they don't work at sea, is very important," says Andrew Parish, CEO of Wavebob. "The common feeling is, wave [power] is where wind was 15 years ago."

For all the promise of electric power generated by the sea, there are many impediments, from construction costs to environmental concerns and the sheer unpredictability of the weather. But rising energy costs and concerns over climate change are providing renewed impetus -- and a new sales pitch -- for those pursuing such projects.

Wavebob plans first to target customers with the greatest need: Ireland, Tahiti, Hawaii, and New Zealand are all promising early markets. Oil companies, which run their offshore derricks on diesel power, are also potential early customers. Chevron, in fact, is an investor. Defence departments are also interested.

Meanwhile, OpenHydro has developed what looks like a giant kitchen fan for harnessing tidal power. The company has raised around $75m (£38m) and has been testing a prototype off the coast of Scotland. More turbines will go in the water off the UK's Channel Islands and in Canada's Bay of Fundy over the next few years.

Energy potential

For wave power, Ireland's location is ideal. Perched in the North Atlantic, it sits in the path of the Gulf Stream, cold air masses from Greenland, and winds from North America. The fetch -- or the distance that wind travels without obstruction -- across the Atlantic is one of the longest in the world, and that wind energy in turn propels waves.

"The average wave energy is 70 kilowatts per wave metre. There is nothing else like it. If you go to Portugal, you have an average of 40 kilowatts per metre," says Graham Brennan, program manager for renewable-energy research and development at Sustainable Energy Ireland, the government's green-technology arm. "There are higher average wind speeds in the band of the Earth that we live in. The fetch is an enormous factor."

Potentially, waves could provide up to 70 per cent of Ireland's electrical power, Brennan says. Ireland consumed 24 terawatt hours of power in 2006, and roughly 20 terawatt hours could conceivably be tapped from waves.

It could also mean quite a number of jobs in regions of the country hit hard by the decline in fishing. The government's goal is to create 1,900 jobs. Wavebob, for one, will base some operations in Killybegs, a struggling fishing and shipbuilding centre.

In January 2008, the Irish government created a €26m (about £21m) fund for development and commercial deployment of ocean energy. The fund also provides for a feed-in tariff that will pay wave farm owners 22 cents per kilowatt hour for their energy, higher than the subsidy for wind power.

Hostile deep seas

Wavebob says its device -- a large buoy, technically called a self-reacting point absorber, with an internal chamber that can accommodate mechanics and technicians -- will be capable of producing 1.5 megawatts of power when the full-scale version is ready in 2010.

When incoming waves pressurise fluids contained in chambers in the buoy, the pressure then turns a turbine. Unlike other prototypes, Wavebob's device also senses the power of incoming waves and automatically adjusts to maximise pressure and energy extraction.

Wave energy won't be easy, though, says Parish, Wavebob's CEO. The company's founder, William Dick, a physicist who helped computerise distilleries on the island, started working on wave power in the early 1990s. A small prototype in a wave tank in Cork and the quarter-size scale device in Galway have worked fine, but the real test comes with the full-scale device in two to three years off the Mayo coast. If it succeeds, multi-megawatt wave farms can start being planned for 2015 and beyond.

Besides needing to survive harsh seas, the devices have to be cost-effective. To this end, Wavebob has teamed up with Georgia Tech to see if it's possible to make buoys out of concrete rather than steel. Capital will also have to be spent to build coastline power stations and undersea electrical cables, which can cost €1m per kilometre.

With all of these challenges, the government's goals -- 500 megawatts, 1,900 jobs -- are pretty lofty. James Ryan, who manages strategic planning and development services at the Marine Institute, explains that knowledge about the ocean is fairly sketchy, too. The Institute recently completed a digital map of Galway Bay -- the first map of the sea floor since Brits undertook the job with chains and weights in the 1860s.

"The seabed in deep water is as a least as hostile as deep space. We can monitor Mars on a 24/7 basis, but we're not yet able to do that with the ocean," says Ryan. "It's about time we caught up with the space guys."

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