Comment: Come to VA and do the same thing, Wave Power is better than Nuke Power, Uranium Mining and blowing up VA mts for coal to ship to China!
Dec 2010 | United States
Columbia Power Technologies LLC, a subsidiary of Greenlight Energy Resources based in Virginia USA, designs fibreglass buoys to harvest energy from waves in the sea and is due to close a $2 million Series A round of investment led by $750,000 from the Oregon Angel Fund. The company hopes that this investment together with $3.5 million in already-secured federal grants and another investment round planned for 2011 will allow the company to get its wave buoys onto the market within the next two years.
Columbia Power Technologies' wave buoys can generate energy from multiple parts of a wave as waves move in more than one direction. The intial buoy design could only harvest energy from the vertical motion, but now in its third generation the redesigned buoy has a pair of wing-like rotary devices capable of capturing the energy from both points of movement - the heave, which is vertical, and the surge, which is the forward movement - of the wave. Most of the equipment sits under the water and waves rotate "wings" around an axis at the top of the device, while a plate at the bottom provides resistance.
The prototype buoy is called the Manta, as the wings copy the movement of a Manta Ray. The Manta will be made from fiberglass rather than steel so that it will not corrode. At full-scale, and up to 80 feet tall, a buoy will be capable of producing up to 2 megawatts of electricity during peak conditions while positioned one to three miles offshore.
The recent funding combined with $3.5 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Navy, will be used to develop a prototype one-seventh the size of the full-scale buoy for testing. By early 2011 the company hopes to have the prototype in Puget Sound to test it in more powerful waves.
Top image source: Columbia Power Technologies
Read more:
http://www.energyharvestingjournal.com/articles/fibreglass-buoys-to-harvest-wave-energy-00002864.asp?cssforprinting=true
