wave energy

One of the most overlooked, yet most promising forms of potential alternative energy is ocean wave power. When you consider that currents and waves in the ocean are very constant, far more so than solar or wind, there are few reasons not to harness it.

The key reason why wave power is difficult to harness is the potential harshness of rough weather and storms. At any given time, a storm could damage devices that harness wave power.

Alan Burns, and his CETO system looks to fix this problem by placing low-cost balloon pump devices on the sea floor. By positioning the device on the sea floor, arranged in “wave farms” where hundreds of balloons can bob in unison to the current, CETO is protected by the surface storms that have hampered the development of wave power. And since the device will not have to be built to survive storms, it can be built at a lesser cost.

Burns envisioned large wave farms with potentially hundreds or even thousands of CETO balloon pumps offshore, where the seabed is vast and not crowded. The wave farm will systematically pump seawater towards shore under high pressure, where it can be used in desalinization plants, or pumped through turbines in a power plant, generating electricity. The design is brilliantly simple, and answers virtually all the problems that plagued wave power in the past. Here’s a rundown of the roadblocks that CETO has solved:

Storms – The turbulence from potential storms is nearly non-existent at the sea floor, when compared to the ocean surface.
Durability – All materials that will be used in constructing CETO are proven for decades of use on existing oil rigs already. Expensive and delicate devices are kept on dry land, as the wave farms only work to pump sea water toward the surface.
Production – The simple balloon and piston design allows CETO pumps to be manufactured in one factory, and shipped (deflated) to anywhere in the world, with less manufacturing costs overall.
Aesthetics – By being placed on the sea floor, CETO wave farms will not cause public criticisms over use of space, unlike wind and solar power. Nobody will even know the farms are there.

The first major wave farm is slated to be off the coast of Albany, Austrailia. It will have 300 balloons and produce approx. 50 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 30,000 homes. And this energy will come from the Earth, in the limitless fashion of wave power.