World’s First Wave Farm (Portugal)
October 31, 2008
Recently Manuel Pinho, Portugal’s Economy Minister visited the Aguçadoura wave farm in a ceremony to officially inaugurate the project. He travelled to the site on the Portuguese Naval Frigate “Corte Real” where a helicopter was launched to film the Pelamis machines and the raising of the Portuguese flag on one of the machines.
Pelamis Wave Power Ltd is the manufacturer of a unique system to generate renewable electricity from ocean waves.
The Pelamis Wave Energy Converter is a revolutionary concept, the result of many years of engineering development by PWP. It was the world’s first commercial scale machine to generate electricity into the grid from offshore wave energy and the first to be used in commercial wave farm projects.
The Pelamis Wave Energy Converter is a semi-submerged, articulated structure composed of cylindrical sections linked by hinged joints. The wave-induced motion of these joints is resisted by hydraulic rams, which pump high-pressure fluid through hydraulic motors via smoothing accumulators. The hydraulic motors drive electrical generators to produce electricity. Power from all the joints is fed down a single umbilical cable to a junction on the sea bed. Several devices can be connected together and linked to shore through a single seabed cable.
Pelamis offers technological, economic and environmental advantages including:
* Survivability ‘built in’
* 100% available technology
* No maintenance carried out at offshore site
* No offshore intervention required
* ‘Hands Free’ operation
* Lowest kWh costs in the market
* High return potential
* Commercial track record
* Verified and insured
Current production machines are 140m long and 3.5m in diameter with 3 power conversion modules per machine. Each machine is rated at 750kW. The energy produced by Pelamis is dependent upon the conditions of the installation site. Depending on the wave resource, machines will on average produce 25-40% of the full rated output over the course of a year. Each machine can provide sufficient power to meet the annual electricity demand of approximately 500 homes. (text by Pelamis)
http://www.pelamiswave.com/
Related Post: Anaconda Wave Power
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