Ocean Power Technology (OPTT) has already succeeded in generating electricity using wave motion, but the trick is making the technology cheap enough to compete with everyday fossil fuels.
Government subsidies for some alternative energies won't last forever. Wave energy has some advantages over other alternatives: it's more concentrated and is active for a greater number of hours per year than wind and solar.
OPT’s wave buoys are fabricated and tested near the coastal site where they’ll be deployed, while the power take-off and control system – the “smart part” – are built in New Jersey.
Each PowerBuoy can generate up to 40 kilowatts of electricity, and they can be deployed in fields large enough to fire a 100 megawatt power station. Here, an OPT buoy is deployed in Spain.
A 10-Megawatt OPT power station would occupy only approximately 30 acres of ocean space.
PowerBuoys can be deployed offshore in fields to provide energy to an onshore grid or far out to sea to provide power for maritime terrorism surveillance.
The company is also in production of a PowerBuoy that will produce 500 kilowatts, and once in use the cost of wave technology will be about 10 cents per kilowatt hour.
The PowerBuoy takes up only a small percent of the area of a wind turbine. A field of PowerBuoys takes up about 1/35th of the area of a wind turbine field generating the same amount of energy.