Maines waters may soon bring a source of power - WABI
Maines waters may soon bring a source of power
CASTINE, Maine (WABI) - “This device will take the wave motions and convert that into electricity,” said UMaine Advanced Structures & Composite Center Executive Director, Habib Dagher.
Maine is riding a wave into the future.
Or should I say, waves.
Maine Maritime Academy, Oscilla Power, and the University of Maine’s Advanced Structures & Composites Center have been working together for over seven years to develop another type of energy sourced from waves in the ocean.
The project has been funded by the Department of Energy.
“Many people know that wave energy has many advantages. It’s a 24/ 7 resource that is, you can technically power the world many times over. Of course, not all of that is practical. We think different, fully deployed, we can get to maybe 500 gigawatts with really good technology. And that’s the dream that we’re going after,” said Oscilla Power’s CEO, Balky Nair.
A one-sixth scale model of Oscilla’s Triton wave energy converter was successfully deployed on December 1st.
“In its position right now, it could be there for a long, long time. It’s really well moored and in a great position to collect the energy of the waves that it’s going to be experiencing. So, like today, we’ve got a little bit, maybe two- or three-foot chop out here, and I believe it’s making a good amount of energy right now,” said MMA Waterfront Sailing Master, Capt. Will McLean.
Now, with this scale model installed, producing energy and collecting data, they are tiding things over until the next step.
“The next step of this is to see how it holds up, how much energy it produces, and they’d like to go and build a full-size unit here in two to three years and put it on the west coast where they have some major waves,” said Dagher.
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