Say hello to wave power, goodbye to emissions. In the choppy sea near the Swedish coastal town of Lysekil, a number of giant yellow buoys hide a ground-breaking technology that may be one of the answers to the world’s quest for sustainable energy solutions.
The sea around Sweden is choppy enough to make wave power a more efficient alternative than solar or wind power. Photo: Benny Ottoson / Maskot
Inventors and researchers worldwide are busy working on ways to generate power without creating greenhouse gases. At the Swedish Center for Renewable Electric Energy Conversion at the Ångström Laboratory, Uppsala University, researchers have for the past six years been working on a unique wave power technology that is now ready to go into production.
Energy companies, academics and public officials from around the world are flocking to Uppsala University to see how its researchers are harnessing the power of the sea.
Power of the sea
Behind the research is Professor Mats Leijon, who is regarded as the world’s leading authority on renewable electric energy conversion. He made his name while working at Swedish-Swiss industrial giant ABB, where he came up with the solution to a 100-year-old conundrum that experts have called the biggest thing to happen in generators in the last century.
Leijon says that the superiority of wave power over other renewables comes down to basic high school physics. “Energy is the integral of power over time,” he explains. “That means that it’s important to have some power, but it is more important to have it over a longer time.”
Swede Mats Leijon is power-crazy; he promotes the use of wave power to generate energy. Photo: Anette Andersson
So while solar power is available for about 1,000 hours a year and wind power for about 2,200 hours a year, wave power is available for up to 4,000 hours a year. This is based on how much the sun shines and the wind blows in Sweden, as well as how choppy the sea around Sweden is. And if you use the open coasts of the UK or Norway, you are talking up to 6,000 hours a year.
The Uppsala technology takes the power of waves and turns it directly into electrical energy. It creates no emissions, leaves no harmful waste behind and all you can see on the surface is something that looks like a collection of giant egg yolks bobbing up and down.
Energy business
The wave power solution from Uppsala is simpler than other systems. This is important because simple means cheap, and cheap means it will be attractive as a source of energy. The technology consists of a piston-driven generator on the seabed linked by a cable to a buoy on the surface. The up-and-down movement of the buoy drives the generator, generating electricity. The electricity is then fed into the grid by cables on the seabed.
Half a dozen companies have spun off from Leijon’s research in Uppsala; Seabased is the one commercializing the wave power technology. What one magazine dubbed his “energy empire” also consists of companies involved with wind power and sea current power, both of which are based on the same basic principles as wave power.
A bright idea? Maybe the coastal city of Gothenburg can use wave power to light up its houses in the future. Photo: Yvonne Isaksson / Image Bank Sweden
Generating interest
The solution has generated considerable interest; in one month at the beginning of 2008 more than 1,000 people from around the world visited Leijon’s research department to find out more. Two of Scandinavia’s largest energy companies have placed orders with Seabased, which was named “one of the hottest technology companies in the country” by two Swedish magazines in March 2008. It is also on the US Ambassador to Sweden’s list of promising Swedish alternative energy companies (see link below).
Leijon believes that wave power could supply Europe with 2,000 terawatt hours of clean electricity per year. That is about half the electricity used in Western Europe or the United States each year. In Sweden, with its less exposed coasts, wave power could supply about 10 percent of electricity consumption.
No fisherman’s friend
Leijon admits there are drawbacks to wave power, although they are hardly likely to arouse the sort of opposition you could expect to a nuclear power plant.
“The main drawback is that we use areas that others use for other purposes, such as the fishing industry,” he says. There is also a hypothesis that the sound generated by the power plants could disturb the breeding of sea creatures, although this has not been proved.
Leijon’s vision has always been to produce renewable technologies on an industrial scale, and that vision is a step closer to reality now that Seabased has found a site on Sweden’s west coast for its factory. He is confident that wave power will be able to fulfill its potential. “However something that wave power doesn’t have, that wind power, solar power and bioenergy have, is a big lobby group,” he says. “We are not a lot of people. On the other hand, the physics are on our side.”
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David Wiles
David Wiles is the editor of Sweden Today magazine. He is suspicious of wave and wind power, having failed miserably at both surfing and windsurfing as a teenager.
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