Page 20: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (June 2019)

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TECH: RENEWABLE ENERGY

Ef? cient Wave Power ... Really!

enewable energy production er source, energy storage, and wave Hydraulics, Bosch-Rexroth, Deeptek,

Wave-generated power is of? cially ‘hot’, as a num- damping units co-located with existing HYDAC, ISCO Pipe, Wire Co./Lank- could be considered the ber of engineering advances or future offshore wind farms. horst Ropes, and others – is working to

Rand government subsidies develop WECs using patented features

Rodney Danger? eld of have conspired to help deploy, test, and Meet the “Old New” Company that are expected to increase energy re- prove in real-world conditions the vi- A driving force behind the new per- covery rates by an order of magnitude offshore renewable en- ability of various systems. While solar formance projections for Wave En- as standalone units or integrated with ergy sources; it gets no and wind power have jumped out as ergy Converters (WECs) is Martin & legacy WEC systems.

early leaders, there is a renewed push to Ottaway, a New Jersey-based marine The SurfWEC system is also designed respect. There have been turn ocean wave power into a viable, re- engineering ? rm that has been in con- to avoid wave damage associated with a number of high-pro? le, newable source of power and stored en- tinuous operation since 1875 which hurricanes, equipment located in surf ergy. A new entrant is SurfWEC LLC, incubated SurfWEC LLC in Decem- zones, and stationary mooring systems expensive failures that which is aiming to become the ‘go to’ ber of 2018. SurfWEC, with univer- offshore via technology that conquers in the wave energy category, both as a sity and industry partners – Stevens the challenge of highly variable wave have conspired to give stand-alone system and as added pow- Institute of Technology, ABB, Airline sizes. To put it simply, it does this with the sector a poor reputa- tion despite a number of engineering advances.

A new entrant is Surf-

WEC offering a patented “surf-making” Wave

Energy Converter which has been in development since 2007. Its develop- ers promise it will stand out from the ? eld and perform where others have failed. How? The

SurfWEC design im- proves upon a genera- tion of ‘lessons learned,’ and more importantly it makes its own surf.

By Greg Trauthwein

Images: SurfWEC 20 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News • JUNE 2019

MR #6 (18-25).indd 20 5/31/2019 9:38:30 AM