In the first installment of this article series we looked at the benefits of wave energy. If you read it you probably can’t see any for why reason for waves haven’t been harness on larger scale before. Let’s dig in deeper and look at the downsides of harnessing wave energy.
Environmentally Harmful?
There is a couple of downsides with these technologies as well. The first thing I want to mention is that we expect these systems (especially the stream turbine generators) to possess a threat to the life below the surface of the sea. We already know that tidal barrages alter the way large amounts of water is functioning that results in similar effects as those of large hydroelectric dams. We do not have enough data on this area yet, but at time moves on, we will know for sure how much of an environmental danger these systems are.
Costs of Wave Energy
Wave energy is expensive. There is no way around this. On the other hand, once these technologies matures, the governments start to push for further projects on a larger scales, the prices should drop, making these things cost-competitive with the bad boys in the energy industry – such as nuclear fuels, petrol, oil and other fossil fuels.
One of the limiting factors here is that there are not a lot of wave energy farms across the globe to draw knowledge from. There is simply not enough research on this area as of yet.
We don’t know how much money is going to be spent on maintenance on these devices as well. There are very few examples of life lengths of wave power plants.
The bottom line is that wave energy does offer us a great addition to our current set of renewable energy system. It is very likely that wave power generation will be a big part of our future, but currently the technologies and methods involved are not mature enough, resulting in too high costs and requires too much observation.
More on both renewable and non-renewable energy can be found on the following web page: http://energyinformative.org