I had heard about wave power some time ago, but I had no idea that there were so many different ways and scenarios where power could be generated with water: wave power, tidal power, ocean thermal energy conversion, hydroelectric, and others I’m missing I’m sure.

My quest started with trying to learn more about wave power. This is an area of renewable energy that is really in a frontier stage. Looking around the web at all of the different designs feels like what it must have been like in the dawn of the era of human flight. There are so many designs, and so many approaches, and at the moment it’s not clear which ones could work, and which ones are just another crazy guy strapping cloth wings on his back and jumping off a cliff to an early grave. Admittedly, today’s wave power designers have history and computers on their sides, but the variety of approaches is really impressive. Here’s a list of what I found: Salter’s Duck, CETO, Wave Dragon, OWC (oscillating water column), Pelamis, and the Mighty Whale. The last three are discussed in an article here.

It seems that most experts believe that wave power has not yet arrived. There is no debate that there is immense power available in waves and in the ocean in general, but due to the difficulty of operating in the harsh ocean environment and the limited availability of qualified on-shore sites, wave power looks like it’s a resource for the future. There is hope though. Quite a few prototypes of varying designs are in real-world testing right now, so clearly some people think they are on the right track. The prototype of the Wave Dragon is scheduled to finish it’s test run mid 2007, and I can’t wait to see the final results.