Independent Natural Resources Inc, has received a permit for a wave powered facility to desalinate water off the coast of Freeport, Texas. The company hopes that the system will be in operation by the end of the year.

The facility will be a 25 by 50 metre platform under which there will be 18 of the company’s SEADOG wave pumps. Each pump will send water up through three water wheels connected to a generator. The electricity from the generator will be used to power a reverse osmosis desalination machine.

The SEADOG pumps, each of which are about two metres in diameter, rise and fall with ocean swells to capture the energy in the ocean waves.

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Minesto, a Swedish company which is a spin-off from Saab, has obtained funding to test underwater tidal power kites off the coast of Northern Ireland.

The underwater tidal kite consists of a turbine, generator, rudder, which is attached to the bottom with a tether. According to Minesto, it can produce energy in deep water with low flow velocity where no other known tidal technology can operate. Each tidal power kite will produce 0.5 megawatt and will fit into a standard shipping contaner.

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The world’s largest tidal power station is to be constructed off the west coast of South Korea at Incheon.

GS Engineering and Construction has signed a memorandum of understanding with Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power to begin construction next year with a view to completion around 2017.

The power station will have a capacity of 1.32 gigawatts - 3.4 times greater than the capacity of the Rance Tidal Power Station in France which is currently the world’s largest tidal power station. The facility will provide 4.5% of South Korea’s demand for household energy.

Incheon is a city of 2,500,000 close to Soeul. It  has the second biggest tide differences in the world, next to the Bay of Fundy in Canada.

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The world’s largest working wave energy electricity generating device has been officially launched in Scotland.

Known as Oyster, the device, built by Aquamarine Power, is stationed at the European Marine Energy Center Billia Croo site near Stromness. At present, it is the world’s only wave energy device which is producing power to the grid.

Oyster produces electricity  by pumping high pressure water to its onshore hydro-electric turbine which feeds into the national grid to power homes in nearby Orkney and beyond.

Oyster is designed to capture the energy found in near-shore waves in water depths between 10 and 16 metres. There are minimal moving parts and all electrical components are onshore, making it robust enough to withstand the rigors of Scotland’s harsh seas.

At the launch, Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond said that marine energy, such as that produced by Oyster, has the potential to meet up to 20 per cent of the UK’s energy demands and could provide as many as 12,500 jobs, contributing £2.5 billion ($au4.5 billion) to the UK economy by 2020.

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The term "blue energy" refers to salinity gradient power - the energy retrieved from the difference in the salt concentration between seawater and river water. The power is generated using osmosis with ion-specific membranes.

Jan Post, at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, has researched the global potential for electric power generated in this way. His research into the practical applicability, techniques and preconditions for large-scale energy generation from salinity gradients, has shown that very high yields are possible. In the laboratory, it is possible to recover more than 80% of the energy from salinity gradients. In practice, the technical feasibility would be 60-70% and the economic feasibility a little lower than that.

Because of differences in salt concentrations, temperature and other environmental factors, there are significant differences between the continents. The highest technical potential is in Australia where 65% of the energy from salinity gradients could be recovered; South America has the lowest potential at 47%.

There are also significant differences among rivers. The Rhine has one of highest potentials among the world’s 5,742 large rivers. Jan Post estimates that the Rhine has the technical potential to generate 2.4 gigawatts of "blue energy" per annum, of which 1.4 gigawatts could be economically recovered - enough to power around 4 million households.

Jan Post believes that it will take another ten years to bring down the cost of blue energy to a competitive level and to develop membranes which are robust enough to work when the water is polluted and when living organisms accumulate on them.

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Scientists in the Netherlands have previously succeeded in generating electricity at the point where salt and fresh water mix in an estuary using a membrane. Unfortunately, the membranes are expensive and delicate, making the technique costly.

Now Doriano Brogioli of the University of Milan Bicocca in Monza, Italy, has published a paper in the Physical Review Letters which takes a different approach that promises to be much cheaper.

Two carbon electrodes are placed in the salt water and given an initial electrostatic charge - one positive and the other negative. Positively charged sodium ions are attracted to the negative electrode and negatively charged chlorine ions are attracted to the positive electrode. When fresh water flows past the electrodes, the positive and negative ions are diffused away from the electrodes. This increases the electrostatic charge between the electrodes. In other words, some of the mechanical energy in the flowing water is converted into electrical energy.

Doriano Brogioli has demonstrated the technique, which is called an electrostatic double-layer (EDL) capacitor, on a laboratory scale. He calculates that it could eventually be cost competitive with wind power without the perceived environmental problems of wind turbines.

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A British company, Checkmate Seaenergy Ltd, has demonstrated a new wave energy device known as "Anaconda"..

Its inventors claim the key to its success lies in its simplicity: Anaconda is little more than a length of rubber tubing filled with water. Waves in the water create bulges which travel along the tubing gathering energy. In effect, the bulge surfs the front of the wave. At the end of the tube, the surge of energy drives a turbine that generates electricity.

The company has been testing a small-scale, 8 metre long prototype in a wave tank in Gosport, Hampshire, and is now looking to raise funds from investors to build a larger version to test at sea.

The co-inventor of the device, Professor Rod Rainey, said: "The beauty of wave energy is its consistency. However, the problem holding back wave energy machines is that devices tend to deteriorate over time in the harsh marine environment. Anaconda is non-mechanical. It is mainly rubber, a natural material with a natural resilience, and so has very few moving parts to maintain."

See http://www.bulgewave.com/.

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 Last July, a Pelamis wave power generator was towed into the Atlantic about 5 kilometres off the coast of Aguçadoura in northern Portugal. In September, two more Pelamis uints were added. Each Pelamis unit was capable of generating about 750 megawatts of electricity - making this the world’s first commercial wave power project.

The project was a joint venture between the Portuguese power utility Energias de Portugal, a Portuguese electrical engineering company Efacec, and the Australian asset manager Babcock & Brown.

The first problem the project encountered was leaks in the foam-filled buoyancy tanks for the mooring installation. These were replaced but further "technical issues" emerged.

Now, Babcock and Brown, which is in voluntary administration, has announced that it cannot provide any futher fuinding and wants to pull out of the project. According to Anthony Kennaway, a Babcock & Brown spokesman "Babcock & Brown are in process of winding down and we’re looking at offers for all our assets. Pelamis is part of that. All our assets are for sale. We are not putting any more money into the project."

There is currently no timetable for returning the generators to sea.

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Google has filed a patent for a wave-powered data centre. The data centre would also use sea water for cooling.

There are currently an estimated 44 million servers in use worldwide. These use about 0.5% of the world’s electricity - about the same amount as Argentina or the Netherlands.

Google’s patent envisages using existing technology, such as the Pelamis wave energy converter, to generate electricity for large server arrays located at sea where the most wave energy is available.

The Pelamis device consists of a series of semi-submerged cylindrical sections linked by hinged joints. Waves cause these sections to move relative to each other. This motion pumps high pressure oil through hydraulic motors which drive generators to produce electricity. Power from all the joints is fed down a cable to a junction on the sea bed. Several devices can be connected together and linked through a single cable.

Pelamis wave energy converters off Portugal

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A tidal turbine near the mouth of Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland has begun producing electricity at full capacity for the first time.

The SeaGen system is generating 1.2MW, the highest level of power produced by a tidal system anywhere in the world, and is claimed to be the first truly commercial ocean tidal system to achieve full production.

Martin Wright, managing director of SeaGen developers, Marine Current Turbines, said "There are no other tidal turbines of truly commercial scale; all the competitive systems so far tested at sea are quite small, most being less than 10% the rotor area of SeaGen."

The system works like an "underwater windmill" but with twin 16 metre rotors driven by tidal currents rather than the wind.

Another British company, Lunar Energy, is constructing the world’s largest tidal power plant - a giant 300-turbine field in the Wando Hoenggan Water Way off the South Korean coast. The plant will provide 300MW of renewable energy by 2015. An installation of a 1MW pilot plant is expected by March 2009.

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