Stanford University reports a confidence-boost for renewables
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008I’ve often wondered about the wisdom of trying to co-locate offshore wind turbines with wave-energy technology as a way of saving on transmission-line costs and creating a capacity factor that’s much higher than the two technologies on their own. Back in July I e-mailed Francis Farley, inventor of the Anaconda wave power converter — basically a snake-like machine that captures the kinetic energy in the waves as its various segments bob up and down. I asked Farley what he thought about the idea of pairing his system with offshore wind. “You have a good point,” he said. “There would be some economies in combining offshore wind with wave energy, and some sites would have both.”
I dropped the idea, thinking it might be good fodder for a column at a later date. Then I noticed this week that Eric Stoutenburg, a researcher at Stanford University, came to a similar conclusion in a research paper that he presented this week at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco. “If wave energy wants to get off the ground, it might have better potential to develop in the shadow of an offshore wind plant,” Stoutenburg told Cleantech Group. (more…)
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca