Hammerhead. The 'hydraulic energy management module' is an...

Hammerhead. The 'hydraulic energy management module' is an elegant way of saying 'a dummy load'. It is supposed to simulate the resistance in the piping and the forces in the desalination plant, Pelton wheel, etc. What it precisely consists of has never been explained. I suspect it would be a very simple device, robustly made to withstand the high forces generated by the buoy-actuator but dissipating the energy at every stroke of the pump. If the design fits the reality, the energy generated could be as high as 200kW. Your electric jug is probably 2 - 3kW, so that is up to 100 jugs worth of heat to lead away from the pump into the sea.

I've been ruminating over the last year how they would make such a dummy load for testing purposes. There might a range of possibilities. One simple guess is to make a perforated plate with each aperture controlled by a spring loaded one-way valve. The heat is generated is ?exchanged? to the sea water. No big deal. It could be that they left this till last as it is only a temporary device anyway, and then it wasn?t finished in time!

It seems to be management?s outlook to thoroughly test every component prior to installation and then to do the same for each system segment. They started off with small physical models and have now scaled up to what they regard as optimum (full) size all the while feeding data into their computer models so as to enable prediction of effects when changes are made. It means having control of your experiment and having confidence in the outcomes. (It is the opposite of the suck-it-and-see approach.)

This particular in-the-water test is of paramount importance as only then can decisions be made to either to commence mass production or to further modify. Because of their systematic approach to date I would think any modifications would be slight. That view is also supported by the fact that CWE have stated that testing should take less than one month. (Although that was supposed to be during Jan, then Feb at the latest, but now is in March.)

They will need about 30 B-As to supply the 5 MW turbine-generator so that it is only after the decision to proceed is made that the layout of the Christmas tree of gathering pressure lines to shore can be determined and then built. It is a matter of being careful before large costs are incurred in each stage.

The difficult question you raise, Hammerhead, is the one about how precisely the energy output can be estimated. This is directly related to how efficient the whole process is from known wave amplitude to power out, and which I have been pondering over for some years in order to make comparisons with competing technologies. I suspect they won?t be able to make a good estimate at this time because the dummy load will be only a very rough equivalence of the impedance of the pipeline plus end point machinery.

We always would like full and final answers to our questions but it is the nature of R&D to progress by milestones and the coming test is a major one. CWE realises this and is being meticulous in ensuring that it will be a success, the time delays being the offset.

Juke