Covering almost three quarters of the Earth’s surface, oceans are one of the world’s most valuable and yet largest untapped renewable resources.
Ocean wave energy is immense, with a huge contribution to make to the clean energy transition. “Wave and tidal energy have the potential to be significant, reliable, and sustainable power sources,” says José Miguel Rodrigues, a senior research scientist at SINTEF, one of Europe’s largest research institutes.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that wave energy could generate up to 29,500 TWh per year. That’s nearly ten times Europe’s total annual electricity consumption, and similar to the global annual electricity demand. So, every effort should be extended to tapping it, and CorPower Ocean's heart-shaped buoy is just one of many devices being tested around the world by various different enterprises.
Heart specialist Dr Stig Lundbäck was inspired by the pumping of the human heart to co-found Swedish wave energy company CorPower Ocean and over years of hydrodynamic research, the company developed ‘CorPack’ - a gigantic buoy made from durable, lightweight materials that converts the movement of waves into clean and stable electricity.
Similar to the heart’s use of hydraulic pressure to pump blood in one direction, CorPack works by applying tension on itself to pull the buoy down, while the waves push it up. The wave motion is turned into rotation, which is then converted into electricity by generators. The wave energy converter’s mechanism enables a large amount of energy to be harvested using a relatively small and low-cost device, says CorPower Ocean.
CorPower Ocean’s first full-scale wave energy converter is deployed off the northern coast of Portugal, near Aguçadora, where it is supplying energy to the Portuguese grid.
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