Giant 60-Foot Buoy Harnesses
Giant 60-Foot Buoy Harnesses Input. Giant buoys over 60 feet tall may one day produce sustainable clean energy for local power grids. Nothing is simpler than going with the flow of the ocean, and everything depends completely on timing to keep the idea going. It appears in the company’s blog: Swedish CorPower Ocean has announced the completion of its first commercial scale buoy generator demonstration off the coast of northern Portugal . Natural C4 Wave Energy Converter 3-storey WEC survived four Atlantic storms during the previous six-month run, and it adopted several of the constantly changing wave heights. The final analysis is yet to be done but as indicated by CorPower, it looks like the technology is a turning point .
New Atlas explains that the basic theory behind CorPower’s C4 is relatively simple. As the air-filled chassis bobs along the rolling waves, an internal system cheeses the up-and-down movement to rotational power for energy generation. At the same time, however, a tensioned, internal pneumatic cylinder reacts in real time to wave phases; slightly delaying its mevement behind the waves amplifies the buoy’s bobbing, thereby enabling even more energy production . According to the company, the system can offer as much as 300-percent average power boost.
Giant 60-Foot Buoy Harnesses ;But what happens when the sea gets choppy, as it were, specifically during storms that saw waves up to almost as high as the machine? This is when the pneumatic cylinder turns off its active control and the device goes into “transparent” mode, simply enduring the adverse conditions of the ocean until it has to turn back on. According to CorPower, this “tuning and detuning” is also the term used to refer to other systems similar to the C4 in wind turbines that adjust the pitch of their blades according to the weather.
Giant 60-Foot Buoy Harnesses ;CorPower says its team recorded as much as 600kW of peak power production during the C4 trial, although they believe it’s possible for the buoy’s current version to ramp that up to around 850kW. That by itself isn’t much compared to a single offshore wind turbine’s multi-megawatt range, although the plan is eventually to deploy thousands of more efficient WEC machines to create a much more powerful generator network. If it can scale a farm up to produce 20 gigawatts of energy, it estimates the buoys could offer something between $33-$44 per megawatt-hour. That’s not entirely accurate for investors, though C4’s aquatic power source operates virtually 24 / 7, unlike traditional wind or solar generators .
At present, however, 20 gigawatts will entail over 20,000 buoys, so a lesser uneconomical and efficient buoy system will be surely needed before anyone starting the deployment of fleets of these canary yellow contraptions on the open oceans. CorPower seems to have confidence that all goes well as planned, its next step is to carry out trials of multiple C4 buoys.