The article is about another type of renewable energy but this reference to wave energy caught my eye. What the author says is true, so far wave energy has not been able to achieve that goal.
"As your machine gets bigger your dollar per megawatt gets more financially efficient. They were eventually able to do that,” Castro says, noting that wave energy has not yet overcome its 1 MW Everest despite considerable investment.
“If they don’t get over that barrier they will always be seen as a fringe sideline technology never up to that utility scale.”
http://www.decentralized-energy.com/articles/2016/04/ener-core-gears-up-to-launch-2-mw-offering.html
Well CWE will soon be arriving at base camp when they get their 1MW Ceto 6 in the water. The challenge then is to break through the 1MW barrier to achieve those cost savings that trigger profitability.
Research at the University of Adelaide has been going on for several years to find ways to improve the energy harvesting capability of wave energy devices. I had read that it might be possible to improve output by a factor of 2 or 3.
"This study investigates the use of max- imum power point tracking (MPPT) control — a simple gradient- ascent algorithm well developed for solar and wind energy — on a novel wave energy converter comprising a fully submerged oscil- lating buoy and a tether coupled hydraulic power-take-off (PTO) unit. A study of the sensitivity of control to irregular wave fluc- tuations/variability was proposed to systematically determine the step size and update rate of MPPT controller.
The world’s first commercial scale fully submerged wave energy converter (WEC), Carnegie’s CETO system, was used as a test case to assess the proposed methodology under passive damping control. Simula- tion results demonstrated that the MPPT damping controlled sys- tem designed based on the sensitivity study is more effective and robust compared to the fixed-damping system with a globally op- timized generator damping. The power loss of the MPPT damping controlled system due to tracking and wave/sea state variability is 1.9% of the acausal optimal damping controlled system.
http://www.maths.adelaide.edu.au/kozwaves2015/KOZWaves2015_files/KOZWaves15_book.pdf
https://www.businessnews.com.au/article/Carnegie-in-18m-project-with-University-of-Adelaide
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