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Swell Fuel selling wave-harnessing test units
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The 1 kW and 5 kW lever-articulating buoy system is being made available for testing, while providing the testers with power generation capability.
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Last Monday I interviewed Christopher Olsen of Swell Fuel, a company with a new design for harnessing the power of ocean waves inexpensively. Several prototypes have been deployed in various places around the world.
Chris is the inventor and primary player in the company, and is building his 58th prototype.
The remarkable features of the design include its ability to use leverage of the pivoting buoy with two levers, as well as its ability to adjust for low and high tides. The moving parts use seals to make the mechanism impervious so that the power shafts do not touch salt water. Chris proposes that in the case of an incoming storm, the buoy could disconnect itself from the anchor and then power itself to shore with a propeller.
In an interesting twist to third party testing, which usually takes a lot of time and money, Swell Fuel is selling test units for those entities who are willing and able to collect data. The customer gets a power-producing unit, and Swell Fuel gets data. It's a win-win scenario. The other costs of building all these prototypes along with filing patents has been covered by Chris, who is fortunate to be able to support these endeavors, so he's not had to seek government grants.
The Swell Fuel "Lever Operated Pivoting Float" electricity generating buoys are available in 1000 watt and 5000 watt sizes.
The ocean energy converter can be used to generate electricity that is sent to shore via marine grade electrical cable or used to supply power to marine industrial electrical equipment. Swell Fuel is presently focusing on off-shore power applications rather than trying to conduct the power to land. One of the difficulties in such transmission at long distances is that it requires the voltage to be stepped up very high so as to not incur so much loss. At this time, it would not be safe to test with high voltages. Perhaps in the future a farm of these could convey their power to a step-up transformer station that would then convey the combined power to land.
The price point on the Swell Fuel wave energy conversion technology is far better than the diesel generator used in remote islands and better than solar because of the 24/7 operation verses the day light hour for solar.
Here are a couple of videos of some smaller demonstration units.
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Links Mentioned
Olsen Interview Audio
See alsoPESWiki.com pages:
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