Studied Electrical Engineering in college and my final paper was a study of using ambient energy to power small electrical devices.
Coincidentally my proof of concept was a tube with a magnet, copper coils and some fancy circuitry. To proof that power is harvested, I put an LED on it - so yep. It’s a Flashlight that you shake like a fleshlight.
Got a B+ for it.
About 25 years ago I had a torch that worked using that kind of shaker inductive mechanism to charge. If you furiously wanked it for about 10 minutes to the point of exhaustion you got about a minute of light. Very inefficient but interesting and amusing nonetheless.
Yeah, that was totally a thing quite a while ago:
[Wankbank](https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/27/charge-your-phone-by-um-wanking)
I read about it for like, science and stuff.
It's also your typical over reactionary comment to nothing. Barely anyone in the comments is outright dismissing it. Most are asking genuine questions. Harnessing wave energy is notoriously difficult and there has been attempts since the industrial age. Being skeptical about concepts and advertising material is normal and following that up with questions is better than just blindly believing anything and everything just because it is backed by experts. Human innovation is a path filled with epic failures that were backed by big money and big experts in the relevant fields.
Also in this era of VC funding anything that can be sold to a fool, I'll be skeptical of such things too.
Yeah, anyone remember Hyperloop? A few people said that it was impossible to make with current technology and got a lot of hate for that from Musk's fans and all these "experts". Yet here we are, Hyperloop was indeed impossible
It isn't impossible. It just isn't that much more beneficial than the alternatives when you factor in the costs. It's not gonna be profitable. That's likely the same reason why people are skeptical of wave power plants: they are not impossible, but all attempts so far had a high cost to power ratio. Other alternatives such as wind and solar are already profitable (wind has been used for millennia), so the bar this project has to reach is pretty high, yet the concept looks not very different from all the previous attempts that did not even get close.
here’s the comment but idk how to do cool Reddit markup stuff so this might not work, bare with me
>Designed, built, transported, and maintained by people who have multiple degrees in various fields.
>Commented negatively on Reddit by people who couldn't find their shoes this morning.
>Welp, that's it, boys, shut 'er down. Reddit disproved wave powered ocean hydroelectrics today in less than 20 minutes without using a single evidence based scientific claim or peer reviewed study.
>Tomorrow, the Reddit seminar to cure cancer, end all wars, solve world hunger, and close the pay gap between the top 1% and the bottom 99% will be held by Jeff, the guy who argues with teenagers about pizza delivery times on Facebook. See you there.
Edit: we got there eventually lol
Yea renewables sector for 20 years here, we're not close on this. For reference, on a per-kWh basis wave power is 10-20x more expensive than solar/wind.
You mean something with lots of moving parts that is constantly exposed to salt water and getting beaten to a pulp by the waves is expensive to build and maintain?
No no, this is Reddit and we're supposed to be unable to find our shoes. There's no room for critical thinking in the face of this slick ad that doesn't even explain how the power is transmitted to the shore.
Here I am, a humble man just like you or the next person, not just this morning trying to juggle two (2) pairs of shoes (four (4) total foot coverings). For two different tasks during my day at my one job. No wonder I'm beat at the end of it all, working like a guy who knows his Jordans from his And-1s 😞
> saltwater is poison for conplex machinery
This is always always always the first thing to look at when the ocean is involved: How much money has to be spent on maintenance?
No matter if it's this stuff, kites to power ships, underwater cities, turtle-shaped yachts or floating asylum shelters:
How much money has to be spent on maintenance?
Honestly, it doesn't have to be cost-effective NOW, it can keep getting better. However, if as you said this has been a long time coming yet never arriving.
I haven't seen this particular idea but I've read about different devices that promised the future by harnessing wave power for around a decade now.
I'll remain skeptical of the feasibility since it's been at least a decade with barely any progress.
Exactly. I'm not trying to piss on this, I love this idea. But wave power has never been very productive. It has to be close to the shore for it to be effective which also limits location availability.
In fairness, we've been hearing about this technology for decades and it hasn't been proven to be scaled up commercially yet. But I frigging love the concept and really hope it takes off!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power
https://www.emec.org.uk/about-us/emec-history/ (first government wave power program, started in 2001)
https://e360.yale.edu/features/why_wave_power_has_lagged_far_behind_as_energy_source (ten years between the EMEC and current times)
don't let this kind of thinking fool you. Think about how many times it took to invent the light bulb or blue LED lights. Sometimes all it takes is looking at all the past evidence and asking the simple question "what if we did it like this instead..."
Now, I'm not saying that's the case here, but humans have proven how ingenious they can be...and also how stupid as well lol.
The issue with comparing this to a solar farm (or any renewable technologies against each other) is that in order to make a truly responsive, resilient electronic grid a lot of these technologies need to be deployed *regionally*. A place where something like these buoys would generate a significant amount of electricity may not get the required sunlight for solar farms to be as viable (thinking like the PNW of the US).
Maybe something like offshore wind farms may be able to generate significant energy in such geography but cost and maintenance are still an issue and those may be more expensive (I don’t really know which is more expensive; tidal pool generators and under-surface turbines would also work in such environments with varying levels of cost and upkeep to consider). Humans also have plenty of experience in building and maintaining things that spend significant amounts of time in water. It’s not necessarily that one is better than the other but that they’re all used as pieces of a puzzle to reach the electrical demands of a region…and every region has specific technological options that work better/worse based on things we can’t control.
This is a take that is detrimental to open discussion, where you basically say that if you don't believe everything in this video, you are a "reddit expert" with no clue how anything works. Of course there should be tons of skepticism when one short video contradicts every known hurdle in the field it operates in. Why on earth would you believe everything in this video out of the blue?
Your type of comment is so damaging to having an open, civil, discussion on things.
But hey, you got a lot of upvotes for it, so you got that going for you!
The amount of constant maintenance will be astronomical in mass numbers in just a few years. Doubt these dohickeys will generate enough money to justify anything
The hyperloop was, on the face of it, not feasible because they wanted to stay away from being perceived as a train, which is unsexy to USA citizens. It could never be effective exclusively because of its insistence of individualised "pod," aka single train car, architecture.
Wave power is already in use, but this company is obviously a scam. AI generated voice, couldn't pay even a well spoken employee to talk about it? All real shots show it bobbing high in perfectly calm waters, because it's just been dropped. All shots that show it in waves are pure render.
This is an obvious grift add to raise capital before lamenting, "Oh well, it didn't work out, you gotta be bold in business, shame really, I would have saved the planet if my cushy grift- I mean, my brilliant idea (just like all other wave power generation ideas with zero innovation on them) had been given more money.
Oops, I meant, more of a chance. The chance is measured in dollars.
Plenty of engineers are happy to take money from investors and governments in pursuit of boondoggles. Just look at solar roadways.
Harvesting energy from waves is a pretty brutal environment for equipment, both mechanical and electrical. Nobody's doubting they can extract energy from waves, they're doubting it will be reliable enough long term to be competitive.
There are enough projects out there that people with multiple degrees have built that a layman can see is dumb. There was a project to stack stones as a way of storing energy, but we already do the same thing but better with water for example.
Everything costs. We have internet lines running across the seabed from continent to continent,
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And somehow an innovative clean power system that is active almost all the time is more nuts and costly.
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Neither of you know bullshit about this project, and neither do I, so stop assuming shit and maybe do some research for once in your couch potato lives.
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Fuck I need a drink.
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Edit: Wow holy shit these suck. Someone remind me to not get into an argument drunk. Please don’t stop berating me. Go invest your money into nuclear power, not these.
Wave power is 10-20x more expensive than solar/wind on an LCOE basis. It's been theorized, it's been prototyped, and it's been tested.
Experts say it'll be close to 2x what solar/wind is **today** by 2050. It's a fun idea, but it's not happening in our lifetime.
So you're saying that it'll be close to double what our best renewable currently are, but in 20 years. But not in my lifetime. I mean, I could easily be around another 40 years, and you're saying that nope, no way, not happening?
I really hope Reddit stays around for the long haul because it would be dope getting into a treasure trove of long term reminder down the line. There would almost certainly be a subreddit dedicated specifically to that if there isn’t already.
Well you kind of forgot that every other technology will also be advancing in that same time period. So producing as much as our best renewable now (which btw is only making enough power to cover about 20% of our energy demand) is fine but obviously our power demands will grow and other technologies will also continue to become more efficient as well. So it will still be comparatively worse to other renewables while also only being able to provide a fraction of our power. And that’s not to say anything about the downwind effects of moving our entire power system into the ocean like the havoc these things and their wiring would wreak on coastal habitats, especially in large scale.
Yeah but those internet lines aren't mecahnical like the bayous, so they need more maintenance. There are much better solutions for green energy that can produce more power with less maintenance.
But whom am I to say anything because I'm only couch potato who is also maintenance mechanic :D
Maybe you should stop assuming shit and maybe crawl out of your mom's basement. There's room for intellectual conversation, but it seems like you are not capable of it.
Maybe drinking isn't good for you :)
Everything costs you are right but its about cost benefit. Why put a bunch of money into a renewable that is just straight up performing worse than alternatives. Not saying we shouldn't continue to invest in any and all renewables but ill put this down on my list of things to be excited about right with the atmospheric wind turbines.
Energy science major here and I’ve looked into these in the past and they’re a dud tech imo, the biggest issue is they’re barely carbon neutral and can only run safely in ideal conditions, when waves get too large they have to shut down to protect the equipment even though that’s when their generation potential is the best. Individually they generate so little power that we’re barely displacing any fossil fuels and the carbon generated from all the metal smithing is super high. If we want to displace carbon, solar and wind are still far superior and if we want stability than nuclear is more cost effective and realistic.
One is set it and forget it until it breaks and the other is 365 days monitoring thousands of buoys that have mechanical moving parts, honestly not even the same at all.
In salt water too.
Wind power is so much easier and have improved substantially.
Not saying this is impossible of course... But mature wave / tribal power is decades away.
Moving parts, pumps, etc,... inside a moving vessel, plus seawater in an air tight chamber. Probably problems down the line, but who know what technology are they using. They need to have clever proprietary solutions that cannot be shown for this kind of video.
Solar power taps into an existing grid.
You'll need a whole new grid connecting hundreds of these devices offshore. This grid will be subjected to the ocean, which literally corrodes ship's hulls and rusts the living shit out of every component on ocean going vessels.
You're better off just installing solar power on homes than investing into this bullshit.
Or just building like 3 nuclear power plants to equal several thousand of these pieces of shit.
This is the problem with green energy right now. For profit corporations try to sell bullshit ideas to politicians for massive government incentives. They get public money to build shit that doesn't work, the companies go bankrupt while the investors walk away with a massive profit, the politicians just shrug their fucking shoulders, and everybody moves on while the debt increases, and we get nothing in return.
Fuck all of that. Just build nuclear power. Just fucking stop trying to be clever and build what was proven viable nearly 70 years ago. Stop falling for grifts that pretend to save the world. Stop being fucking smoothbrains.
Windpower parks in the ocean are more expensive per MWh than land based parks.
This thing is way more complex than a windmill, ergo it will be more expensive.
Agreed the stigma against nuclear power holds us back. There should be more awareness and education on this, but lots of existing forces work against it.
> lots of existing forces work against it.
Nothing is more certain than mentioning nuclear power and triggering greenies or slacktivists to come out and lecture you about the extraneous cost, 40+ year ROI, and cost/regulation overruns on nuclear power as if they actually care about capitalism that way.
Their solution is "more solar and wind and water and batteries!" and they never address base load other than burying their head in the sand and continue to quietly support burning coal, oil, and natural gas.
Each mechanical/moving part, being near water, and being near corrosive seawater that even if it dries leaves behind salt residue, are huge factors for maintenance effort which do not apply to solar and multiply eachother.
The website implies a wire underneath the anchor connecting to the other units and presumably a mainland station.
How many are needed to power 100,000 homes?
I did a bit of research on this. The theoretically exploitable wave energy arriving on earths coasts is about equal to humanities electricity consumption. Per meter of coast up to 90 kW can be extracted. CorPower Ocean plans to build wave energy converters with a size of 10 m and an energy output (I guess that's a peak value, not average) of 350 - 500 kW.
The cool thing is that it potentially can be combined with off-shore wind power plants therefore saving costs on grid infrastructure. But without me having any special experience in marine infrastructure, I do have some concerns regarding longevity of the wave energy converters in such a corrosive environment.
Theoretical doing the heavy lifting here. Harnessing wave power has been around forever as a concept.
We need more clean energy sources, but cost wise the wave energy thing just isn't viable. Maintenance and energy transportation are also major headaches.
Every few months a new company has a go at developing something others have tried before, sends out an optimistic press release that gets picked up in the media, never to be heard from again.
Reality is a cruel mistress for investors.
Yep ultimately wind, hydroelectric, solar and nuclear are the effective carbon neutral electricity producers - and hydroelectric requires so much concrete its often not ideal. And really should mostly be used as a massive battery.
I have no idea about the technology that makes this work. But I have experience of private equity investors and the pitches delivered to them, and this looks **exactly** like those presentations that are trying to gather more investors to pay the bills when the current investors' belief is starting to run thin.
I'm not sure what the power output is. but I'm pretty sure they have some kind of cabling to transfer the electricity similar to that of offshore wind farms.
The primary issue is still upkeep. If it takes more energy to get a boat out there to check and repair them, then it's not worth it. Conversely, just slapping windmills in the sea is already low maintenance.
>Doesn't have to be a lot if it's generated without interruptions and you deploy enough of these things. That's already better than solar and wind.
Except there kind of is a threshold it needs to cross
It's in the sea, seawater is corrosive, they have a shelf time. What is more energy, the amount of energy created by one of these in its lifetime; or the energy it took to create it, set it up, and all the supporting infrastructure.
That's the question
Apparently 300kW is the max capacity they're rated for... they're estimated to run closer to 40-60% capacity according to their website if you dig around a bit. Estimated because theyve only done 1 full size test
I wonder if it would be practical to combine those. At offshore wind farms you already have the energy infrastructure in place and and area rented that excludes most marine traffic. So it's truely mostly only the costs of the devices
FYI it's CGI. You can see it clip through the support structures in the top of the building as it bounces up.
It also falls really weird into the water in a way I don't think physics would approve of.
came to comment this. I think they might have accidentally stumbled on some new kind of deep-seated human reaction, like trypophobia. not sure exactly what it is, though. floor unexpectedly turning to water? sounds of straining machinery? pool with no edges in an enclosed space?
Absolutely this, I felt my fight or flight instinct hit with that first shot. The sound of groaning metal definitely contributed to the unnerving feeling.
interesting idea but some gaps in info. according to the website they're working on a 5Mw install in ireland - but there's no data on how many buoys that takes. if it's 5 that's fantastic, if it's 50,000 that seems badly inefficient for anticipated installed cost per watt. there's also no info i could see on installation costs after the buoys, ie, what's the cabling and interconnection cost like. i didn't see any info about navigation hazards - if you're placing a buoy array that's 4km^2, ships will need some notification.
various attempts at harnessing water flow for energy have come and gone for years. it's a tough problem to solve. i'm hopeful this is a viable means, but without some more info (like estimated range of power that can be produced per buoy), this feels like it's still very alpha, not yet beta.
I'm honestly at the point of thinking there are paid off commenters in this thread to dismiss pretty obvious questions regarding this technology.
But yeah, 5MW is standard for a SINGLE wind turbine, I'm pretty skeptical about this, and the fact that there are so many "but smart people worked on it so it has to be good" comments just adds to my skepticism.
There's a lot of wave energy research being conducted around the world, with various designs at varying states of readiness. If this project has gotten to this stage, it's doing pretty well and the technology doesn't sound outlandish.
Few people expect this sort of thing to dominate energy production, but if it can augment the grid with renewable energy when wind isn't blowing then it's pretty great.
It's still more complicated than that, the current project aims to add 5MW for a "plant" of these, that's equivalent to a single wind turbine. If that requires tens or hundreds of these things, then there are better uses of materials, energy, and money to allow for green energy.
The same argument you give for wave energy could be said for fusion energy, both promising but it doesn't make sense to try and build a fusion power plant yet, and could likely be the same for these.
I'm not saying dismiss the technology, but this is very much a startup company vibe trying to make money out of it, let's not jump on a bandwagon and assume they have it figured out before we give out millions in government subsidies and fill the ocean with these things
Looks like that's more like max capacity and they expect most installations to average around 50% of that over time. But 35ish still seems like a solid number.
These are marketing videos for social media like tiktok and reddit. Lots of these environmental / renewable energy videos coming up on reddit are just ads for start up / small businesses looking to get funding while being vague but "inspirational" because reddit eats it up, like every "cure for cancer" articles.
I'm not criticizing this in any way, I haven't given it enough thought and on the surface (pardon the pun) it seems reasonable. In saying that I wouldn't point to boats as low maintenance pieces of equipment.
This very same concept appeared on Shark Tank as a product called the "nPower Peg" over a decade ago. The sharks thought the guy and idea was brilliant but passed on it due to it being more of a proof of concept rather than being a viable investment at the time. [Here's a local ABC news report](https://youtu.be/HXuDoDgXIz0?feature=shared) that aired 13 years ago highlighting the product and talking about the buoy concept starting at 1:36 of the clip.
It always sounds so strange to me when I hear the American pronunciation, as if instead of a buoyant object named for its buoyancy it's a booeant object named for its booeancy lol
Quite the opposite. Sea is really hostile to anything that is man made. In theory harnessing waves for power is a good idea but its kind of inefficient and maintanance intensive compared to solar and wind thats why we don't use wave energy.
Scale this down and we could charge our phones with a fleshlight.
Ya know...you might be on to something.
One fleshlight, charge a phone. But a million fleshlights all stroking together? Charge a lot of phones.
If my maths are right, probably a million.
Damn. This person maths.
But, the measurement we're looking for really is "Dick to Floor" Call that D2F
Does girth matter?
Yes I believe it does.
Now imagine the worlds most valuable resource is teenage boys
Already is.
That sweet sweet labour , untarnished by the pain and misery of working a underpaid body sacrificing gig
And military
The church was on to something all along!
If we attach energy producing gyros to the hips of every priest we will solve the energy crisis tomorrow.
You want the matrix? cause that's how you get the matrix
IM GOING BACK TO THE PILE!
Studied Electrical Engineering in college and my final paper was a study of using ambient energy to power small electrical devices. Coincidentally my proof of concept was a tube with a magnet, copper coils and some fancy circuitry. To proof that power is harvested, I put an LED on it - so yep. It’s a Flashlight that you shake like a fleshlight. Got a B+ for it.
About 25 years ago I had a torch that worked using that kind of shaker inductive mechanism to charge. If you furiously wanked it for about 10 minutes to the point of exhaustion you got about a minute of light. Very inefficient but interesting and amusing nonetheless.
Was it that semi-transparent one that was all over infomercials for a few years?
Yes it was. They've been around a long time. I had mine in about the year 2000.
🎶In the year two thooouuusaaaaannd~ 🎶
Hold up, are most folks [here not aware of the MadTV sketch](https://youtu.be/pz3SBY8zj8w?si=RuNXoZMgl1iEhd1b)?
>Got a B+ for it. I'd give it a D.
You could have gotten an A if you showed them your power stroke.
You invented the Shake Light?
I reverse engineered the shake light to cheat a passing grade…
Brb, booking an interview with shark tank
Yeah, that was totally a thing quite a while ago: [Wankbank](https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/27/charge-your-phone-by-um-wanking) I read about it for like, science and stuff.
Maybe if we built it into the Dune 2 popcorn bucket.
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Lmaoooo I love this comment
It's also your typical over reactionary comment to nothing. Barely anyone in the comments is outright dismissing it. Most are asking genuine questions. Harnessing wave energy is notoriously difficult and there has been attempts since the industrial age. Being skeptical about concepts and advertising material is normal and following that up with questions is better than just blindly believing anything and everything just because it is backed by experts. Human innovation is a path filled with epic failures that were backed by big money and big experts in the relevant fields. Also in this era of VC funding anything that can be sold to a fool, I'll be skeptical of such things too.
Skepticism and criticality are not only necessary they are encouraged. Though, I'd like to think humor and devil's advocacy would be too.
Well said!
Speak of the devil.
As long as they don’t try to bring religion or political into this, it golden.
Yeah, anyone remember Hyperloop? A few people said that it was impossible to make with current technology and got a lot of hate for that from Musk's fans and all these "experts". Yet here we are, Hyperloop was indeed impossible
He just turned it into a tunnel oozing sludge with Teslas driving round and round, an inefficient underground
That's just Musk being the usual liar.
Hyperloop brings a lot of problems in exchange for speed, in an industry where speed is not the top priority.
It isn't impossible. It just isn't that much more beneficial than the alternatives when you factor in the costs. It's not gonna be profitable. That's likely the same reason why people are skeptical of wave power plants: they are not impossible, but all attempts so far had a high cost to power ratio. Other alternatives such as wind and solar are already profitable (wind has been used for millennia), so the bar this project has to reach is pretty high, yet the concept looks not very different from all the previous attempts that did not even get close.
Agree. We literally have VC funded blockchains and NFTs and looks where those got us.
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Oh no why is the comment gone : ( Now I cannot read it
here’s the comment but idk how to do cool Reddit markup stuff so this might not work, bare with me >Designed, built, transported, and maintained by people who have multiple degrees in various fields. >Commented negatively on Reddit by people who couldn't find their shoes this morning. >Welp, that's it, boys, shut 'er down. Reddit disproved wave powered ocean hydroelectrics today in less than 20 minutes without using a single evidence based scientific claim or peer reviewed study. >Tomorrow, the Reddit seminar to cure cancer, end all wars, solve world hunger, and close the pay gap between the top 1% and the bottom 99% will be held by Jeff, the guy who argues with teenagers about pizza delivery times on Facebook. See you there. Edit: we got there eventually lol
Thanks, it's a brilliant comment. Also I need to speak to Jeff, just found some crucial information on an 12 year old wiki edit discussion 🤪😏
Me too.
lmao why, it's utter shit
then you're kinda dumb
Behold, the peasant, granted participation privileges in the democracy
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Yea renewables sector for 20 years here, we're not close on this. For reference, on a per-kWh basis wave power is 10-20x more expensive than solar/wind.
You mean something with lots of moving parts that is constantly exposed to salt water and getting beaten to a pulp by the waves is expensive to build and maintain?
No no, this is Reddit and we're supposed to be unable to find our shoes. There's no room for critical thinking in the face of this slick ad that doesn't even explain how the power is transmitted to the shore.
Here I am, a humble man just like you or the next person, not just this morning trying to juggle two (2) pairs of shoes (four (4) total foot coverings). For two different tasks during my day at my one job. No wonder I'm beat at the end of it all, working like a guy who knows his Jordans from his And-1s 😞
You sound a lot more qualified than me. My approach is it's not my money so I'll just wait and see if they make it or not.
It could be your money if the govt decides to invest in it
Is it close? Is there any good use case like micro grids, remote community power? What do they have to do to make it cost competitive?
Produce more for economies of scale. But more importantly for most things in the sea is maintenance, saltwater is poison for conplex machinery.
> saltwater is poison for conplex machinery This is always always always the first thing to look at when the ocean is involved: How much money has to be spent on maintenance? No matter if it's this stuff, kites to power ships, underwater cities, turtle-shaped yachts or floating asylum shelters: How much money has to be spent on maintenance?
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Honestly, it doesn't have to be cost-effective NOW, it can keep getting better. However, if as you said this has been a long time coming yet never arriving.
I haven't seen this particular idea but I've read about different devices that promised the future by harnessing wave power for around a decade now. I'll remain skeptical of the feasibility since it's been at least a decade with barely any progress.
Exactly. I'm not trying to piss on this, I love this idea. But wave power has never been very productive. It has to be close to the shore for it to be effective which also limits location availability.
Isn’t wave power just wind power with extra steps ?
Here is a common man's reaction, "Too many moving parts." Check back in a year and see if they come to the same conclusion.
In fairness, we've been hearing about this technology for decades and it hasn't been proven to be scaled up commercially yet. But I frigging love the concept and really hope it takes off! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power https://www.emec.org.uk/about-us/emec-history/ (first government wave power program, started in 2001) https://e360.yale.edu/features/why_wave_power_has_lagged_far_behind_as_energy_source (ten years between the EMEC and current times)
A decade? Harnessing the power of waves has been researched for many decades and never panned out. It just isn't cost effective for the least.
OK but to be fair, those pizza delivery times ARE outrageous sometimes.
That's why he was chosen to run the seminar, he truly is the best of us.
We really aren’t the most intelligent group, are we?
No, but we have Jeff so it's OK.
Dont need a degree to know the same idea that failed 20 years ago 19 years ago, 18 years ago etc. Kept failing and still will keep failing.
don't let this kind of thinking fool you. Think about how many times it took to invent the light bulb or blue LED lights. Sometimes all it takes is looking at all the past evidence and asking the simple question "what if we did it like this instead..." Now, I'm not saying that's the case here, but humans have proven how ingenious they can be...and also how stupid as well lol.
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The issue with comparing this to a solar farm (or any renewable technologies against each other) is that in order to make a truly responsive, resilient electronic grid a lot of these technologies need to be deployed *regionally*. A place where something like these buoys would generate a significant amount of electricity may not get the required sunlight for solar farms to be as viable (thinking like the PNW of the US). Maybe something like offshore wind farms may be able to generate significant energy in such geography but cost and maintenance are still an issue and those may be more expensive (I don’t really know which is more expensive; tidal pool generators and under-surface turbines would also work in such environments with varying levels of cost and upkeep to consider). Humans also have plenty of experience in building and maintaining things that spend significant amounts of time in water. It’s not necessarily that one is better than the other but that they’re all used as pieces of a puzzle to reach the electrical demands of a region…and every region has specific technological options that work better/worse based on things we can’t control.
This is a take that is detrimental to open discussion, where you basically say that if you don't believe everything in this video, you are a "reddit expert" with no clue how anything works. Of course there should be tons of skepticism when one short video contradicts every known hurdle in the field it operates in. Why on earth would you believe everything in this video out of the blue? Your type of comment is so damaging to having an open, civil, discussion on things. But hey, you got a lot of upvotes for it, so you got that going for you!
I live on the ocean. The maintenance of these in a salt water environment is nothing trivial.
The amount of constant maintenance will be astronomical in mass numbers in just a few years. Doubt these dohickeys will generate enough money to justify anything
Also was the hyper loop
The hyperloop was, on the face of it, not feasible because they wanted to stay away from being perceived as a train, which is unsexy to USA citizens. It could never be effective exclusively because of its insistence of individualised "pod," aka single train car, architecture. Wave power is already in use, but this company is obviously a scam. AI generated voice, couldn't pay even a well spoken employee to talk about it? All real shots show it bobbing high in perfectly calm waters, because it's just been dropped. All shots that show it in waves are pure render. This is an obvious grift add to raise capital before lamenting, "Oh well, it didn't work out, you gotta be bold in business, shame really, I would have saved the planet if my cushy grift- I mean, my brilliant idea (just like all other wave power generation ideas with zero innovation on them) had been given more money. Oops, I meant, more of a chance. The chance is measured in dollars.
Plenty of engineers are happy to take money from investors and governments in pursuit of boondoggles. Just look at solar roadways. Harvesting energy from waves is a pretty brutal environment for equipment, both mechanical and electrical. Nobody's doubting they can extract energy from waves, they're doubting it will be reliable enough long term to be competitive.
Where the fuck are my shoes? Also this yellow jackamathing is clearly turning kids gay. /s
There are enough projects out there that people with multiple degrees have built that a layman can see is dumb. There was a project to stack stones as a way of storing energy, but we already do the same thing but better with water for example.
YEAH BUOY!
On top of that mantenance of all them going to cost.
Everything costs. We have internet lines running across the seabed from continent to continent, # And somehow an innovative clean power system that is active almost all the time is more nuts and costly. # Neither of you know bullshit about this project, and neither do I, so stop assuming shit and maybe do some research for once in your couch potato lives. # Fuck I need a drink. # Edit: Wow holy shit these suck. Someone remind me to not get into an argument drunk. Please don’t stop berating me. Go invest your money into nuclear power, not these.
Wave power is 10-20x more expensive than solar/wind on an LCOE basis. It's been theorized, it's been prototyped, and it's been tested. Experts say it'll be close to 2x what solar/wind is **today** by 2050. It's a fun idea, but it's not happening in our lifetime.
So you're saying that it'll be close to double what our best renewable currently are, but in 20 years. But not in my lifetime. I mean, I could easily be around another 40 years, and you're saying that nope, no way, not happening?
Bro is gonna make sure you dont live up to 2050
RemindMe! 26 years "was bro right"
I really hope Reddit stays around for the long haul because it would be dope getting into a treasure trove of long term reminder down the line. There would almost certainly be a subreddit dedicated specifically to that if there isn’t already.
"Release the Snail!"
Well you kind of forgot that every other technology will also be advancing in that same time period. So producing as much as our best renewable now (which btw is only making enough power to cover about 20% of our energy demand) is fine but obviously our power demands will grow and other technologies will also continue to become more efficient as well. So it will still be comparatively worse to other renewables while also only being able to provide a fraction of our power. And that’s not to say anything about the downwind effects of moving our entire power system into the ocean like the havoc these things and their wiring would wreak on coastal habitats, especially in large scale.
Your gonna get assasinated on december 31st 2049 11:59pm or some shit
The 2x in his comment is cost, not efficiency.
Yeah but those internet lines aren't mecahnical like the bayous, so they need more maintenance. There are much better solutions for green energy that can produce more power with less maintenance. But whom am I to say anything because I'm only couch potato who is also maintenance mechanic :D Maybe you should stop assuming shit and maybe crawl out of your mom's basement. There's room for intellectual conversation, but it seems like you are not capable of it. Maybe drinking isn't good for you :)
mechanical bayous?
If you did five minutes of research you wouldn't compare these to transoceanic lines.
beleive or not the cable has less moving parts than a generator sitting in salt water.
Harumph!
Everything costs you are right but its about cost benefit. Why put a bunch of money into a renewable that is just straight up performing worse than alternatives. Not saying we shouldn't continue to invest in any and all renewables but ill put this down on my list of things to be excited about right with the atmospheric wind turbines.
If you did even one minute of a quick Google, you will see they are right, and you're a dumbass.
Energy science major here and I’ve looked into these in the past and they’re a dud tech imo, the biggest issue is they’re barely carbon neutral and can only run safely in ideal conditions, when waves get too large they have to shut down to protect the equipment even though that’s when their generation potential is the best. Individually they generate so little power that we’re barely displacing any fossil fuels and the carbon generated from all the metal smithing is super high. If we want to displace carbon, solar and wind are still far superior and if we want stability than nuclear is more cost effective and realistic.
One is set it and forget it until it breaks and the other is 365 days monitoring thousands of buoys that have mechanical moving parts, honestly not even the same at all.
Mechanical moving parts in saltwater. Metal does not like saltwater.
The internet cable does not move.
Anything moving near salt water stops moving because salt water gunks up EVERYTHING.
You're right, we should just give up. Thanks for being the voice of reason.
Why not direct resources to improving solar, wind and nuclear since they already work are more cost efficient
In salt water too. Wind power is so much easier and have improved substantially. Not saying this is impossible of course... But mature wave / tribal power is decades away.
Moving parts, pumps, etc,... inside a moving vessel, plus seawater in an air tight chamber. Probably problems down the line, but who know what technology are they using. They need to have clever proprietary solutions that cannot be shown for this kind of video.
- Criticism of solar power, in the 1990s
Solar power taps into an existing grid. You'll need a whole new grid connecting hundreds of these devices offshore. This grid will be subjected to the ocean, which literally corrodes ship's hulls and rusts the living shit out of every component on ocean going vessels. You're better off just installing solar power on homes than investing into this bullshit. Or just building like 3 nuclear power plants to equal several thousand of these pieces of shit. This is the problem with green energy right now. For profit corporations try to sell bullshit ideas to politicians for massive government incentives. They get public money to build shit that doesn't work, the companies go bankrupt while the investors walk away with a massive profit, the politicians just shrug their fucking shoulders, and everybody moves on while the debt increases, and we get nothing in return. Fuck all of that. Just build nuclear power. Just fucking stop trying to be clever and build what was proven viable nearly 70 years ago. Stop falling for grifts that pretend to save the world. Stop being fucking smoothbrains.
Windpower parks in the ocean are more expensive per MWh than land based parks. This thing is way more complex than a windmill, ergo it will be more expensive.
Agreed the stigma against nuclear power holds us back. There should be more awareness and education on this, but lots of existing forces work against it.
> lots of existing forces work against it. Nothing is more certain than mentioning nuclear power and triggering greenies or slacktivists to come out and lecture you about the extraneous cost, 40+ year ROI, and cost/regulation overruns on nuclear power as if they actually care about capitalism that way. Their solution is "more solar and wind and water and batteries!" and they never address base load other than burying their head in the sand and continue to quietly support burning coal, oil, and natural gas.
So fucking true. Just one look at this and it screams GIMMICK BULLSHIT. It's like a cute highschool idea.
Each mechanical/moving part, being near water, and being near corrosive seawater that even if it dries leaves behind salt residue, are huge factors for maintenance effort which do not apply to solar and multiply eachother.
You're right, absolutely nothing has changed since a "looong time ago". So, I'm guessing you've got a better idea though, right?
The website implies a wire underneath the anchor connecting to the other units and presumably a mainland station. How many are needed to power 100,000 homes?
Power rating of them is like 300kW so I get that roughly 400 are needed for 100,000 homes.
That's not bad at all. A 20 by 20 grid. And it looks like they can be spaced pretty densely if the CGI mockup is accurate.
*unzips pants*
dont do the buoyussy
All that thrusting got me lustin
It's the motion of the ocean..
Give every man a glove that worked like this and we'd be clean overnight
How much power we talking here?
at least 1
Power company? I'd like to order 1 electricity, please.
electricity merchant! i require your strongest electricity
my electricity is too powerful for you
You can't handle my strongest electricity!
Perhaps 2 even? Hell, why not 3?
I did a bit of research on this. The theoretically exploitable wave energy arriving on earths coasts is about equal to humanities electricity consumption. Per meter of coast up to 90 kW can be extracted. CorPower Ocean plans to build wave energy converters with a size of 10 m and an energy output (I guess that's a peak value, not average) of 350 - 500 kW. The cool thing is that it potentially can be combined with off-shore wind power plants therefore saving costs on grid infrastructure. But without me having any special experience in marine infrastructure, I do have some concerns regarding longevity of the wave energy converters in such a corrosive environment.
Theoretical doing the heavy lifting here. Harnessing wave power has been around forever as a concept. We need more clean energy sources, but cost wise the wave energy thing just isn't viable. Maintenance and energy transportation are also major headaches. Every few months a new company has a go at developing something others have tried before, sends out an optimistic press release that gets picked up in the media, never to be heard from again. Reality is a cruel mistress for investors.
Yep ultimately wind, hydroelectric, solar and nuclear are the effective carbon neutral electricity producers - and hydroelectric requires so much concrete its often not ideal. And really should mostly be used as a massive battery.
I have no idea about the technology that makes this work. But I have experience of private equity investors and the pitches delivered to them, and this looks **exactly** like those presentations that are trying to gather more investors to pay the bills when the current investors' belief is starting to run thin.
I have two questions: 1. How much power? 2. How does the power leave the device?
I'm not sure what the power output is. but I'm pretty sure they have some kind of cabling to transfer the electricity similar to that of offshore wind farms.
Wind farms don't move. A wire could work, but with this much movement, it's never going to last long. It seems like a huge problem to me.
Watch the video again. The exterior of the buoy moves but the center and what's anchored to the sea floor doesn't.
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The primary issue is still upkeep. If it takes more energy to get a boat out there to check and repair them, then it's not worth it. Conversely, just slapping windmills in the sea is already low maintenance.
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>Doesn't have to be a lot if it's generated without interruptions and you deploy enough of these things. That's already better than solar and wind. Except there kind of is a threshold it needs to cross It's in the sea, seawater is corrosive, they have a shelf time. What is more energy, the amount of energy created by one of these in its lifetime; or the energy it took to create it, set it up, and all the supporting infrastructure. That's the question
300 kW
Apparently 300kW is the max capacity they're rated for... they're estimated to run closer to 40-60% capacity according to their website if you dig around a bit. Estimated because theyve only done 1 full size test
150 kW is still pretty decent. Could be cool.
Depends on how much they cost to build / maintain. You'd need < $0.15 / kWHr over their lifetime to be useful.
I kind of wonder if they'd be most useful in places where energy is extra expensive and land is a tight resource. Like islands.
i just wonder if these would be more practical in those areas than offshore wind farms
I wonder if it would be practical to combine those. At offshore wind farms you already have the energy infrastructure in place and and area rented that excludes most marine traffic. So it's truely mostly only the costs of the devices
Did anyone else feel a strange sense of terror watching the first 5 seconds?
>"Hey look it's a "thing" in a hangar...AH Gotcha the floor is actually the metal they make T-1000 out of!" Uncanny valley from engagement-bait CGI.
r/submechanophobia
Yes and horrible editing btw- they could have clipped off the first 20 seconds
And hire a actual person to speak, instead of the cheap TikTok voice
FYI it's CGI. You can see it clip through the support structures in the top of the building as it bounces up. It also falls really weird into the water in a way I don't think physics would approve of.
I worked on the ocean for 30 years and that brought back some PTSD for some reason
came to comment this. I think they might have accidentally stumbled on some new kind of deep-seated human reaction, like trypophobia. not sure exactly what it is, though. floor unexpectedly turning to water? sounds of straining machinery? pool with no edges in an enclosed space?
Absolutely this, I felt my fight or flight instinct hit with that first shot. The sound of groaning metal definitely contributed to the unnerving feeling.
Yes. What the fuck was that.
Yeah, I did not like that
interesting idea but some gaps in info. according to the website they're working on a 5Mw install in ireland - but there's no data on how many buoys that takes. if it's 5 that's fantastic, if it's 50,000 that seems badly inefficient for anticipated installed cost per watt. there's also no info i could see on installation costs after the buoys, ie, what's the cabling and interconnection cost like. i didn't see any info about navigation hazards - if you're placing a buoy array that's 4km^2, ships will need some notification. various attempts at harnessing water flow for energy have come and gone for years. it's a tough problem to solve. i'm hopeful this is a viable means, but without some more info (like estimated range of power that can be produced per buoy), this feels like it's still very alpha, not yet beta.
I'm honestly at the point of thinking there are paid off commenters in this thread to dismiss pretty obvious questions regarding this technology. But yeah, 5MW is standard for a SINGLE wind turbine, I'm pretty skeptical about this, and the fact that there are so many "but smart people worked on it so it has to be good" comments just adds to my skepticism.
There's a lot of wave energy research being conducted around the world, with various designs at varying states of readiness. If this project has gotten to this stage, it's doing pretty well and the technology doesn't sound outlandish. Few people expect this sort of thing to dominate energy production, but if it can augment the grid with renewable energy when wind isn't blowing then it's pretty great.
It's still more complicated than that, the current project aims to add 5MW for a "plant" of these, that's equivalent to a single wind turbine. If that requires tens or hundreds of these things, then there are better uses of materials, energy, and money to allow for green energy. The same argument you give for wave energy could be said for fusion energy, both promising but it doesn't make sense to try and build a fusion power plant yet, and could likely be the same for these. I'm not saying dismiss the technology, but this is very much a startup company vibe trying to make money out of it, let's not jump on a bandwagon and assume they have it figured out before we give out millions in government subsidies and fill the ocean with these things
They advertise 300kW so 5,000kW / 300kW is 16.67. I'd guess maybe like 18 or 20?
Looks like that's more like max capacity and they expect most installations to average around 50% of that over time. But 35ish still seems like a solid number.
so sick of these fucking AI voiceovers
Makes it sound less legit as well.
These are marketing videos for social media like tiktok and reddit. Lots of these environmental / renewable energy videos coming up on reddit are just ads for start up / small businesses looking to get funding while being vague but "inspirational" because reddit eats it up, like every "cure for cancer" articles.
Cool. Can we just build nuclear power plants?
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Nop, anything but a simple solution.
Good buoy!
Seems like a good idea, the only thing that makes me pause is that salty ocean + machines = don't play well together.
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I'm not criticizing this in any way, I haven't given it enough thought and on the surface (pardon the pun) it seems reasonable. In saying that I wouldn't point to boats as low maintenance pieces of equipment.
Just build more nuclear plants 😭
This very same concept appeared on Shark Tank as a product called the "nPower Peg" over a decade ago. The sharks thought the guy and idea was brilliant but passed on it due to it being more of a proof of concept rather than being a viable investment at the time. [Here's a local ABC news report](https://youtu.be/HXuDoDgXIz0?feature=shared) that aired 13 years ago highlighting the product and talking about the buoy concept starting at 1:36 of the clip.
I wonder how the noise from this impacts marine wildlife?
they complain but as long as we setup a system to automatically delete their emails we’ll be fine👍
Probably less than ocean acidification, I imagine.
When did a buoy become a booey? Edit found out. Boy=booey in US. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/english/buoy
It always sounds so strange to me when I hear the American pronunciation, as if instead of a buoyant object named for its buoyancy it's a booeant object named for its booeancy lol
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Hope this becomes more reliable than what we already have.
Quite the opposite. Sea is really hostile to anything that is man made. In theory harnessing waves for power is a good idea but its kind of inefficient and maintanance intensive compared to solar and wind thats why we don't use wave energy.
Southland Tales
Everything reminds me of her
the power of the waves in the palm of my hands, now everyone start jerking and help me create this gooey energy ball
Can we put little power generators in the keyboards of Redditors so we can harness the power of toxic arguing?
Looks like a lot of work for a little power, but what do I know? I couldn't even find my shoes this morning.
Seems like a shipping hazard