Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Wave Power: Living on an Island has its perks...


The World Energy Council just named Australia’s southern shores the world’s most promising site for the development of wave power.

The World Energy Council noted that if we developed just 10% of our country’s viable wave power sites, we could achieve our goal of reducing emissions by 60% of year 2000 levels by 2050. That means that if just 20% of the possible wave power sites in Australia were developed, the whole country could be run entirely by the sea.

Mark Hemer (a physical oceanographer from Australia’s CSIRO Wealth for Oceans National research flagship) did a study with his colleague, David Griffinm, in the AIP’s Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy to completely flesh out the potential of the Australian waves.

Hemmer and Griffen found that Australia’s energy consumption is 130,000 gigawatt-hours/year and that it could be covered with only a small portion of viable wave power areas.

In their study, the team does not push Australia to generate all of their energy from wave power, but they are strong proponents of using this “massive resource” as a way to cover Australia's goal of reducing emissions.

With recent developments and technology in wave energy becoming ever more efficient and powerful - this task might not be so difficult for us to carry out.

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