Wave energy To successfully transition the grid, Australia needs...

Wave energy
To successfully transition the grid, Australia needs to triple its renewable energy output by 2030 and increase it seven-fold by 2050, AEMO says in its latest Draft 2024 Integrated System Plan.About 6 gigawatts, enough to power 540,000 homes, of extra capacity is needed each year, compared to 4 gigawatts currently being built. Many other countries face similar energy dilemmas and Europe, in particular, is keen to tap into the latent power of the oceans.“Waves are incredibly powerful. They can lift a cruise or container ship up and down effortlessly,” Fievez said.Carnegie has developed a 20-metre wide, hockey puck shaped, submersible buoy that hovers a few metres under the ocean’s surface. Each unit is capable of generating 1 megawatt of energy. As the wave passes, the buoy lifts and three belts attached to the seabed drive electric winches in the buoy, passing the current generated through cables back to the shore.The minimum size of an offshore wind farm is around 300 megawatts.CREDIT:GETTYSeventy patents cover various parts of the technology. A key element, designed with help from Hewlett Packard, uses an offshore device to feed data to an AI control system that predicts the wave intensity and adjusts the buoys to best extract energy.AdvertisementUnlike Australia, Fievez said, Europe is extremely receptive to wave technology.“We will be extracting energy from waves on a large scale. It’s just a question of when.”Jonathon Fievez, Carnegie Clean EnergyCountries such as Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland and the UK see waves as a critical alternative to solar and wind, which fade in the depths of the northern winter. Carnegie, with a market cap of just $21 million, is an ASX minnow, but it boasts former AFL commissioner and businessman Mike Fitzpatrick among multiple investors.Australia’s key wave regions could generate around five times the country’s annual electricity needs, Fievez said. “Sadly, we’re having to go to Europe to get support to continue on.”The EU is targeting 1 gigawatt of ocean energy deployment by 2030 and a massive 40 gigawatts by 2050 through its Offshore Renewable Energy Strategy. Carnegie has been given $8 million by European governments to deploy and test a smaller version of its system, with buoys about 8 metres wide, as part of EuroWave’s competitive Biscay Marine Energy Platform off the coast of Spain.The minimum size of an offshore wind farm is around 300 megawatts.“It’s early days, but 100 units is a starting point for a fully commercial project for us,” he said.“You either spend a huge amount on storage, or you find technologies to fill the gap. We will be extracting energy from waves on a large scale. It’s just a question of when.”