Swedish company develops a kind of 'water kite', capable of generating electricity through the energy of sea waves.
Swedish company Minesto has developed a new device called the Dragon 4 that helps provide renewable energy to the Faroe Islands, an archipelago located between Iceland and Scotland. The device acts as an 'aquatic kite' that generates energy through tidal flows and ocean currents, i.e. wave energy.
With a modular, lightweight and scalable design, the Dragon 4 has been in testing for over 10 years and since the last year it has been powering the Faroe Islands electricity grid.
'Aqua Pipa' has a total capacity of 120 MW
According to Minesto, the kite's wing uses the hydrodynamic lift force generated by the underwater current to move the kite. With an onboard control system, the kite is autonomously flown in a predetermined figure-of-eight trajectory, pulling the turbine through the energy of sea waves in water flow several times greater than the actual speed of the kite. flow. The axis of turbine moves the generator that produces energy and sends it to the grid.
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The small 100kW system was installed in October last year in the Faroe Islands and has delivered record results in terms of total energy generated, overall energy conversion and peak performance.
A second piece of equipment has already been installed and since then the company has had a detailed plan for the gradual development of sets of turbines. With a total capacity of 120 MW of sea wave energy, generating around 350 GWh annually, the arrays would supply 40% of the Faroe Islands' growing energy consumption.
Minesto aims to bring water kite to Taiwan and Philippines
According to Minesto, power generation equipment is a patented ocean technology which uses the same principle of flying a kite through wind flow. However, the same is applied to the movement of the tides, taking advantage of the concentrated energy of water, which is almost a thousand times denser than ara.
The European Union aims to obtain 40 GW of ocean energy by 2050, however the development and expansion of this technology still faces high costs and great challenges.
Minesto has already closed partnerships to take the sea wave energy technology for the Philippines and Taiwan, whose energy supply comes 95% from fossil fuels. The objective is to take advantage of the inexhaustible source of renewable energy generated by tidal power and expand access to clean energy in countries that still depend on fossil fuels.
With the benefits presented by Dragon 4, such as scalability, ability to generate clean energy through renewable sources and inexhaustibility, the technology has the potential to help face the challenges of the energy transition worldwide, helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. greenhouse to ensure the ecological and economic sustainability of the regions where it is implemented.
Ocean wave energy increasingly exploited
In addition to Minesto, CorPower Ocean, a company also from Sweden, is creating a great solution to generate clean energy from the sea. Using wave energy, the company created a nnew system that transforms the movement of water into energy to supply cities in a sustainable way.
The solution is extremely practical in the open sea, as floating turbines can absorb renewable energy more efficiently. The solution was created by the company due to its low cost and has a converter that captures wave energy and transforms it into electricity.