Wave powered electricity, the world is awaiting!

I am 81 years of age and had a dream 36 years ago which showed me the way to harness the breaking waves (surf) found in all the seas of the world in order to generate vast amounts of electricity through the use of compressed air. After all these years it has now become a reality and is about to take the world stage to the detriment of all the polluting coal, LNG and even the lesser powered wind and solar energies!

Let me accentuate. In 1996 I took out a PCT patent* on the method but had to wait a few years to get the right start. In 2011 a major US energy company acquired my patent and at the same time and at my request another major Chinese energy company owned by the Government of China was chosen as an equal partner to develop this method and market it worldwide. Now after ten years of development and the investment of many billions (not millions but billions) of US dollars they are fully prepared to take it out to the world.

The patent too has been extended and we are awaiting the delivery of electricity very soon firstly to China and then to many countries in the South China Sea (SCS). The countries concerned are Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and Singapore on the western side of the SCS and Indonesia Brunei Philippines and eventually even Australia (with their polluting coal and LNG stations) on the eastern side of the SCS. The amounts of electricity capacity will be counted in the hundreds of thousands of megawatts and after some years could replace coal LNG wind and solar (as we now know) in the world. China for its part will be able due to this development to close down all its polluting coal and LNG stations (hundreds of them) and be carbon free by the year 2060 or even a little earlier.

The building of seven islands with the necessary infrastructure in the SCS covering a total area of about 3,500 acres is to establish these machines in order to generate the electricity and deliver it to the countries on either side. The electricity will be sent by the largest capacity undersea cable (one million volts DC) to either side of the islands to the different countries. It will start delivery of electricity sometime this year. Further the Chinese have built new very large dredgers in order to build several new islands in different parts of the world for the dissemination of this technology which they call E-TECH-WIN).

Many technical breakthroughs have been made in the development of this patent and if I may give a short description of the technique it may be useful to some readers. The on-shore machines used absorb the energy of the surf (which is mechanical energy Em= Ep + Ek and is often available 24/7)) and the machines turn them into compressed air (to those more technically interested one could go into the WIPO* site and put my full name found below into the patentscope site when you will get my PCT patent and its technical description). The compression of air develops both energy and heat and the heat is absorbed in this technique by the use of dead coral (from the islands both natural and man-made) which has an enormous surface area.

The heat is returned by a heat exchanger when the stored compressed air is used to turn a conventional air turbine which drives a generator. This technology is called CAES or LAES (compressed air energy storage and liquid air energy storage)) and has been used twice before in the world in Germany (Huntorf plant 250 Megawatt) and one other in the USA (110 Megawatt plant) with great success and reliability. In those two cases it is adiabatic storage used but in our case it is a more advanced Isothermal storage which is in itself a technical breakthrough. Efficiency rates of between 95 -98% is possible with this technique.

What is more interesting is that very large amounts of electricity can be generated by this technique and the breaking waves are freely available in large quantities to exploit. There is about 100 kW of power in every metre (length) of a metre high breaking wave and six such waves per minute gives immense power to be exploited. There is more than 50 000 times the energy needed to power the world in the breaking waves of the coasts of the world.

Vera Gamini Samarasinghe