Portugal builds world’s first commercial wave farm!
by Jorge Chapa
What would you do if you ran out of land for wind farms to meet your ambitious renewable energy targets? Well, if you are Portugal, you get creative and build the world’s first wave farm off your coast. The intrepid country is poised to open what will be the world’s first commercial wavefarm, off the coast of northern Portugal at Agucadoura, where the expected total output of the plant will be enough to power around 2,000 homes.
The wave farm uses three Pelamis P-750 machines with a capacity of approximately 2.0 megawatts. The Pelamis machines, created by Ocean Power Delivery, are essentially a series of semi-submerged tubes which are linked to each other by hinged joints. It is these joints which are the trick behind the system. The joints act as a pumping system, by pushing high pressure oil through a series of hydraulic motors, which in turn drive the electrical generators to produce electricity. Needless to say the machines are moored to the ocean bed. To give you an idea of the size of each module, the 750kw prototype, is 120m long and 3.5m in diameter. Each of these modules is composed of three individual 250kw tube.
Three of these machines compose the first phase of the wave farm, which was commissioned by the Portuguese renewable energy company Enersis. They will provide a total of 2.25 megawatts. If successfull the wave farm will be expanded to 30 of such modules. Intriguingly enough, the company mentions that they are not concerned about profitability, which the project wouldn’t reach until there at least enough modules for 500MW. What they want to is prove that there is a market for this type of technology. “What we are assembling here is the first wave farm in the world,” says Antonio Sa da Costa of Enersis.
The wave farm is expected to be operational within the end of the year.
+ Pelamis Wave Power
+ Portugal gambles on ’sea snakes’ providing an energy boost @ the Guardian
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It’s great to see that my country, wich lives a bit in the shadow of Europe, is doing progresses in therms of renewable energies. For the last 10 years we have saw an enormous development on the wind farms that are very common in all the high-lands of the country. Although I think that there is a problem about this because we are producing green energy and at the same time we are destroying a lot of ecosystems and most of all the beautifull landscapes that we have all over the north of Portugal.
I believe the same thoughts can be applied to this kind of system. As we are a country surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, there are great chances to produce energy out of the waves produced by the wind. Allthough there is also the risk of affecting the ecosystems on the open sea (that are alo more vulnerable) and also afecting the navigation.
There are a lot of factors we must think about when we try to implement this technology.