amazing cwe cannot get clear information to journalists so tthey can write factually correct articles. for a media savvy company to not produce clear media releases with updated diagram is just disappointing.
not a paragraph without factual error. very frustrating to see.
anyone want to check numbers from poster comment?
u39b in reply to Rob S Mar 15th, 23:14
There's always potential for further cost reduction - especially for such a new design, dreamt up in a developed country without much manufacturing competition.
At core, this design of wave power generator involves no direct human labour beyond planning, installation and maintenance. That suggests potential for incremental manufacturing engineering, vast scale economies and deployment across large areas of ocean. There is no obvious floor on the price of power from such generators.
To illustrate, assume that each generator unit (approximate CETO 6 specs) can be designed for an expected 20 year life. Assume away discounting and inflation (i.e. a nominal discount rate equal to the inflation rate) for simplicity. Then each unit generates 175.2 GWh over its lifetime (1*24*365*20/1000). To achieve your target wholesale price of $0.03/kWh, you would want to see the full-life cost of these wave generating units to be substantially less than $5.26m each (0.03*175,200,000).
Perhaps, at sufficient scale (manufactured in China by the million), these 1MW wave generating units could be produced for less than $0.5m a pop? Then anchored in wave power fields wherever the Earth's major oceans meet shallow sea beds?
As with solar before it, it may be worth temporarily subsidizing wave power installations, creating a market in which rival suppliers can bid down the price point. There is enough power in the world's waves to supply all mankind's current needs more than ten thousand times over (courtesy of the Earth slowly losing angular momentum under the moon's gravitational pull...).
amazing cwe cannot get clear information to journalists so tthey...
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