Along a quay of the port of Los Angeles, intriguing blue metal floats dance according to the waves and transform their oscillations into electricity. An innovative, the installation perhaps holds one of the keys to accelerate the energy transition.
“The project is very simple”, explains to AFP Inna Braverman, co-founder of Eco Wave Power, an Israeli start-up convinced that the Houlomotor energy represents a “revolution”.
Like touches of piano, the floats descend and go up to each wave.
Connected to hydraulic pistons, they push a biodegradable fluid to a container filled with accumulators, resembling large diving bottles. When they release the pressure, they activate a turbine that generates electric current.
If this pilot project convinces the Californian authorities, Ms. Braverman hopes to cover the 13 -kilometer pier protecting the port with several hundred floats. This would produce enough electricity to supply “around 60,000 homes”.
Houlomotor energy constitutes “a stable and large -scale renewable energy solution for the whole world”, enthuses the Israeli.
Exploiting the colossal force of the ocean has been a real sea serpent for decades: unlike solar, unproductive at night, or wind, dependent on the weather, the sea offers an almost perpetual movement.
The waves of the American West Coast could in theory feed 130 million households and cover 34% of electricity production in the United States, according to the US Energy Ministry.
– Mission impossible –
However, houlomotor energy remains the poor parent of renewables, unable to reach marketing.
The sector is full of corporate shipwrecks and projects sunk by the brutality of the sea: developing fairly robust devices to collect the furious waves, while transporting electricity by submarine cables to the coast has so far proven an impossible mission to make profitable.
“99 % of competitors have chosen to install their equipment in the middle of the ocean, where it is very expensive and where they are constantly broken down,” said Ms. Braverman. “So they can’t really carry out their projects.”
With its retractable device fixed at quay, the entrepreneur believes he has found the Grail.
“When the waves are too high for the system to endure them, the floats simply go up until the storm passes, so that they do not suffer any damage,” she explains.
