SINGAPORE, Feb 5 (Reuters) - For millennia, Australia's
rugged southern coast has been carved by the relentless action of
waves crashing ashore.
The same wave energy could soon be harnessed to power towns
and cities and trim Australia's carbon emissions.
"Waves are already concentrated solar energy," says Michael
Ottaviano, who leads a Western Australian firm developing a
method to turn wave power into electricity.
"The earth has been heated by the Sun, creating wind, which
created the swells," he told Reuters from Perth, saying wave
power had the potential to supply all of Australia's needs many
times over.
Ottaviano heads Carnegie Corp, which has developed a
method of using energy captured from passing waves to generate
high-pressure sea water. This is piped onshore to drive a turbine
and to create desalinated water.
A series of large buoys are tethered to piston pumps anchored
in waters 15 to 50 metres deep (49 to 131 feet). The rise and
fall of passing waves drives the pumps, generating water
pressures of up to 1,000 pounds per square inch (psi).
This drives the turbine onshore and forces the water through
a membrane that strips out the salt, creating fresh water in a
process that normally requires a lot of electricity.
The CETO (named after a mythical Greek sea creature) pumps
and buoys are located under water, differing from some other wave
power methods, for example, those that sit on the surface.
The CETO concept was invented in the 1970s by a Western
Australian businessman Alan Burns and initial development began
in 1999, followed by completion of a working prototype by 2005.
Ottaviano says the company, which works in partnership with
British-based wind farm developer Renewable Energy Holdings and
French utility EDF, is in the process of
selecting a site for its first commercial demonstration plant in
Australia.
The 50 megawatt plant, enough to power a large town, would
cost between A$300 million to A$400 million ($193 million to $257
million) and cover about 5 hectares (12.5 acres) of seabed.
Funding could be raised from existing or new shareholders, he
believed.
DROP IN THE OCEAN
Several sites in Western Australia, including Albany in the
south and Garden Island off Perth, looked promising.
"There's significant interest in these sorts of projects,
even in the current financial environment," he added.
And a 50 MW plant was just a drop in the ocean.
He pointed to a study commissioned by the company that said
wave power had the potential to generate up to 500,000 MW of
electricity along the southern half of Australia's coast at
depths greater than 50 metres (165 feet).
At shallower depths, the potential was 170,000 MW, or about
four times Australia's installed power generation capacity.
Interest in renewable energy in Australia and elsewhere is
being driven by government policies that enshrine clean energy
production targets as well as state-backed funding programmes for
emerging clean-tech companies.
"Australia is going to be one of those markets because of
what the government is doing to drive investment in this sector.
For starters, there's quite a bit of direct government funding
for projects like this," he said.
The federal government has also set a renewable energy target
of 20 percent by 2020, which is expected to drive billions of
dollars worth of investment in Australia over the next decade,
with much of it going into wind farms.
A second company, BioPower Systems, is developing underwater
wave and tidal power systems and expects to complete pilot
projects off northern Tasmania this year.
The company's bioWAVE system is anchored to the sea bed and
generates electricity through the movement of buoyant blades as
waves pass, in a swaying motion similar to the way sea plants,
such as kelp, move.
Tidal power, in which electricity is generated by turbines
spinning to the ebb and flow of tides, has not taken off in
Australia, partly because of cost, but is expected to be a big
provider of green power in Britain in coming years.
Last week, Britain announced five possible projects to
generate power from a large tidal area in south-west England. The
largest of the projects could generate 8,600 MW and cost 21
billion pounds ($29 billion).
CONSTANT
Ottaviano believes wave power is one of the few green
technologies that can provide steady, or baseload power.
Wind and solar photovoltaic panels can only operate at 25 to
30 percent efficiencies because neither the wind nor the sun are
permanently available.
Government policies should promote the development of
technologies that delivered large-scale, high-availability clean
power competitively, he said.
"If you look from an outcome point of view and leave it up to
the market to work out how that is going to be achieved, it comes
down to geothermal certainly being one of the potential
technologies because (of) its high availability and also
potentially cost-competitive and harnessable at large scale,"
Ottaviano said.
Australia has large geothermal potential in remote central
and northern areas.
"Wave is another logical one because it is high availability.
It is 90 to 100 percent available in most sites around southern
Australia."
"You could power the country 10 times over."
CNM
carnegie corporation limited
