Sensors could enhance wave energy generation efficiency

A team at Exeter University has developed a software and hardware solution that is currently being tested.

Wave energy generation technologies are relatively immature compared with solar and wind, and are not yet commercially competitive without subsidy.

Confident that wave power still has the potential to be an important player in the UK’s renewable energy mix, Dr Markus Mueller and colleagues from Exeter looked at ways to enhance the efficiency.

‘The sea is not stable, so you always have different conditions, every wave has a different amplitude, frequency and so on — this affects the wave energy converter,’ Mueller told The Engineer.

The first task was to make this instability slightly more predictable. Mueller and colleagues deployed simple sensor buoys — not dissimilar to the ones used in tsunami monitoring — to gather measurements of wave elevation and longitudinal displacement. These data are sent via a 1hz radio link to the generating devices themselves placed nearby.