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With high oil prices, dwindling fuel supplies and a growing pressure to reduce global warming, governments are looking for brilliant ideas. Why don’t consider the sea? Waves are a powerful source of energy and in the last years a growing attention is producing a wide range of prototypes. Machines of various shapes and sizes are being tested in last years to see how they could capture waves and tides to create “marine” energy.

A new experiment comes from Michele Grassi, researcher at the department of math at the University of Pisa, in the centre of Italy, who built a prototype of a wave-trapping machine.

Submerged, it goes 100mt deep down the water to catch waves’ energy. The problem is that it’s not easy to harness this energy and convert it into electricity in large amounts but the young Italian has conceived different sizes of this revolutionary machine: big and expensive (millions of Euros) able to produce a megawatt of energy and small and cheap (100.000 Euros) with 100 kilowatt able to provide energy to around 30 apartments.
 
“The machine is different from all the other projects that aim to derive energy out of waves. It can be used in a calm sea as the Mediterranean, even if its efficiency in the ocean could be five times bigger” Grassi said.

While marine energy generators do not emit smoky pollutants or leave behind radioactive waste, these machines are not small or unobtrusive. To draw energy from the ocean, they often need to be rooted on seafloors relatively close to shore, in places that traditionally have not been used for energy generation.

At the moment the machine is “top-secret”, only in September the model of Michele Grassi will be experimented but the invention has started already to arouse international interests. Despite his green-friendly intention, it’s quite predictable that his biggest opponents will be environmental groups..

Sources: Berr Offshore -  Rinnovabili - Pure Energy System Wiki - BBC

Image courtesy of Victor Geere at Flickr under Creative Commons