A Canadian renewable energy company has identified two sites in the Western Cape where it plans to establish a wave-power project and is negotiating with the government to lease the areas of coastline.Vancouver-based Finavera Renewables told Engineering News Online that it was committed to building a 20MW wave-power project in the province but that it was reluctant to reveal the exact sites until it had formally leased them.
Richard Worthington, of Earthlife Africa, welcomed the news, saying that the Western Cape had great wave potential.
"There is no reason why we shouldn't be using it."
The West Coast in particular was reputed to have some of the best resources in the world.
Worthington said there were all sorts of ways of harnessing wave energy which were being investigated in various pilot projects around the world.
The infrastructure needed to be strong enough to withstand bad weather.
The Engineering News article said the company was "conducting a final analysis to determine which of the two sites would be optimal for the project, which will have the potential to generate more than 30 million kWh of electricity a month and avoid about 4 000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year".
On the company's website, it says that among renewable energy sources, waves contain "the highest energy density".
"This allows for substantial energy generation in relatively small areas from a virtually inexhaustible energy source."
It claims that an independent market assessment estimated the potential worldwide wave energy economic contribution in the electricity market to be on the order of 2 000 terawatt hours a year. (A terawatt hour is the equivalent of 1 000 gigawatt hours.)
"That is 10 percent of world electricity consumption, comparable to the amount of electricity currently produced worldwide by large scale hydroelectric projects," it says.
The cost estimate of the wave power project in the Western Cape was $40-million (about R280-million).
Douglas Banks, managing director of energy consultancy Restio Energy, said it was likely to have a fairly high capital cost but the advantage was that it would not be affected by price jumps in coal and oil.
Ocean Energy News 
