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Generating electricity from wave power in Britain took a step closer to reality this week after green energy company Ecotricity’s innovative device – Searaser – successfully completed first stage testing at Plymouth University’s CoastLAB wave tank.
The brainchild of British inventor Alvin Smith, Searaser is designed to overcome two of the biggest hurdles in the deployment of renewable energy on a scale that fulfils Britain’s future electricity needs – cost and variable output.
Ecotricity and the Searaser team have spent the past 18 months optimising the design of the device and modelling outputs in real word conditions around the coast of Britain – with the assistance of one of the world’s leading marine energy consultants, DNV GL Group (formerly Garrad Hasan).
Smith said the determining factor in making wave power efficient, and therefore cost-effective, was resilience: “This week’s wave tank testing was carried out to validate the extensive computer modelling we’ve been undertaking.”
“We’ve put Searaser through the most extreme testing regime here at CoastLAB and it’s passed every challenge.”
Unlike other marine energy technologies, Searaser won’t generate electricity out at sea but will simply use the motion of the ocean swell to pump high pressure seawater ashore, where it will be used to make electricity. The motion of the waves drives a piston between two buoys – one on the surface of the water, the other suspended underwater and tethered to a weight on the seabed.
As waves move past, the surface buoy moves the piston up-and-down, pumping volumes of pressurised seawater through a pipe to an onshore hydropower turbine to produce electricity.
The Searaser could be used to pump seawater into coastal reservoirs, from where it can be released at any time of the day or night, to make renewable electricity on demand.
Ecotricity founder Dale Vince said: “Our vision is for Britain’s electricity needs to be met entirely from our big three renewable energy sources – the Wind, the Sun and the Sea.
“We believe these ‘Seamills’ have the potential to produce a significant amount of the electricity that Britain needs, from a clean indigenous source and in a more controllable manner than currently possible.”
Picture credit: © Joseph Cortes | Dreamstime Stock Photos
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