Wave power remains one of the unproved holy grails of alternative energy industry.
Wavebob hopes a 5 million Euro grant will help it toward at 2011 Portuguese trial
The potential is huge. Countries such as Ireland and Australia, and the state of Hawaii have rollers with kilowatts of power per wave meter, a measurement of stored energy.
But making electricity-producing buoys tough enough to withstand the crashing force of storm-triggered walls of water has proven an engineering challenge. Some argue it will be a decade before any substantial commercial progress is made.
Andrew Parish, chief executive of Ireland’s Wavebob, believes the timeline is much sooner. His Maynooth company continues to fine tune its hydraulic wave buoy now being tested in Ireland’s Galway Bay and has its sights set on a second Portuguese trial in the third quarter of 2011.
He claims the Wavebob technology will be appropriate for commercial deployment two years later, in 2013.
“It will be right,” said Parish in an interview at the Irish Consulate in San Francisco on Monday. “We’ve learned our lessons.”
The Portuguese trial will be an important test for several reasons. Perhaps most importantly, it will be the company’s first deployment in open ocean. It also will be connected to the electric grid. Parish is confident the company will receive a 5 million Euro grant from the EU for the project.
When the walls of water come crashing down, the device shuts off for protection, he adds.
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