Wave Power

Although wave energy-harvesting systems are often just presented as concepts, one was recently deployed in Hawaii to provide power to the municipal grid. Built by Northwest Energy Innovations, the Azura device will remain in operation for a 12-month assessment period.

Ordinarily, when a ship is heading into waves, those waves cause it to work harder. An experimental new setup known as a "whale tail," however, utilizes wave action to actually help ships move forward, allowing them to use less fuel when tackling rough seas.

Harnessing wave power can be a tricky business. It's one thing to build a device that simply moves up and down with the waves, but another to build one that's efficient enough to be cost-effective. Swedish company CorPower Ocean claims to have done just that, however.

An old fishing trawler has been given new life in Norway, where it's now anchored offshore in the Stadthavet area and serving as a wave power plant. It's part of a project which ultimately calls for larger, purpose-built vessels to convert wave motion into electricity.

Dragan Tutić felt that using wave power to turn seawater into the drinkable variety on the spot had been largely unexplored. Having now developed a prototype, he hopes to deploy his wave-powered desalinator to where water scarcity threatens the survival of coastal communities.

Scotland's Albatern is putting a modular spin on renewable energy generation. WaveNET is a scalable array of floating "Squid" generator units that convert wave energy into electricity, as their buoyant arms rise and fall with the motion of the waves. The bigger the grid, the more efficient it gets.

The seafloor carpet, a system inspired by the wave absorbing abilities of a muddy seabed being developed at the University of California, Berkeley, takes exploring wave power as a renewable energy source to some intriguing new depths.

Eco Wave Power has signed a memorandum of understanding agreement with the Ocean University of China to secure funding, construct and test a commercial scale wave energy harvesting system.

Stanford University researchers are deploying a fleet of static buoys and Wave Glider robots to turn the waters off the coast of San Francisco into a huge WiFi network to track tagged fish and animals.

Lockheed Martin has teamed up with Ocean Power Technologies (OPT) to develop one of the world’s largest wave energy generation projects yet to be announced.

Eco Wave Power has revealed the construction and testing of a medium-scale version of its Wind Clapper and Power Wing wave energy generation system in the Black Sea.

Eco Wave Power has developed a new wave energy harvest and conversion system based around novel Wave Clapper and Power Wing float designs.