Photo Voltaic investments are even higher subsidised and have a fine EROEI. Here I guess as well a lot of human labour and other raw materials than energy are used. In contrast to agriculture there is little experience and process optimisation in building up these snakes.

Foreign suppliers and producers is as well true for PV, with China the producer #1, without any meaningfull installments there.

Der Amerikaner ist die Orchidee unter den Menschen
Volker Pispers

But there's a huge downside to it: this subsidy is masking the low EROEI of some of these new energy sources, that otherwise should be preventing ill fated projects from surviving in the market.

Huh!?

1. The very point of feed-in tariffs is to separate still in development renewables from the total market, to boost investment which would presumably bring down prices. Wind power was very expensive when feed-in tariffs were invented, too.

2. A market is not a deux ex machina. What survives best on a market depends on how that market is set up. Feed-in laws are part of how markets are set up. Shareholder expectations of regular quarterly profits are also how markets can be set up. Differing exposure of initial investment to interest rates is also part of how a market is set up. Safety requirements, carbon credits, decommissioning fund requirements are all part of how a market is set up, too. And so on.

3. I would also remark that when thinking of energy policy, one could think beyond markets, I mean a public role going beyond setting up the rules of markets.

My order of preference in terms of long term feasibility for marine energy is:

1/ Tidal Lagoons / "Off Shore Tidal Impoundments";

2/ Tidal stream generators on the seabed;

3/ Wave energy.

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson

I prefer the wave energy we are doing here in Uppsala and the similar stuff they are doing at the MIT. Those things seem far more economic and hurricane proof.

   

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

Problemmatic.

1.  You are seeking to compare first generation, first deployment of a technology with basically mature technology as you compare Pelamis with (onshore) wind.  Of course that first generation would be more expensive, even 10 times.

2.  Feed-In-Tariffs are a path for fostering the space between RDT&E and actual deployment, by providing financial incentives into the market space for deploying earlier and at larger scale, to boost the market to enable

3.  Not expert on Pelamis, but what is your basis for a 30% figure in terms of power production. This is lower than what I see for other ocean power system modeling (and, in some cases, actual data).  

4.  Just wondering, where is the .3 Euros for installed wind turbines coming from. This is certainly lower than the data that I see for the overall industry and perhaps 10 percent of the price for offshore wind from what I see.

5.  Looking at 'wave' (and most ocean) power, your line about 'niche' is where I stand. There is a role for wave power, but it is dependent on many factors -- ocean conditions (clearly), other energy options, etc.  

As seen from the Pelamis example, while the Aguçadoura I is an interesting development project from which architects and engineers will learn and improve, the Aguçadoura II does not represent any visibly evolution in technology, presenting essentially the same EROEI.

If Aguçadoura I is an interesting development project, then scaling it up to 25 units is intrinsically interesting, to see how production, installation and maintenance costs scale up.

This is very much a regional opportunity ... Scotland, northern Portugal / northwest Spain (I read that 48 as the southern tip of Portugal and that 65 as the NW corner of Spain), south of Tassie in Oz and the south coast of WA, the island chain that brings Governor Palin's Alaska so close to Russia, Hawaii.

So, obviously, if Portugal gets an early lead with a technological cluster, it could well end up with an engineering oriented industry with a substantial share of the global market.

On EROI:

Considering that those 9 million € are not counting with maintenance costs, it is not a stretch to conclude that the financial return on investment (ROI) is close to 1:1. Where that leaves EROEI is not easy to envision, but it might not be that far off.

It seems unlikely to be anywhere close for a capital-intensive renewable energy project, where there is not a large energy input while producing power. For one thing, there is no compound interest on the energy payback ... energy is being consumed when high NEROI energy is more plentiful, and delivered when it is more scarce ... so the interest cost of the project, which counts in the commercial payback, drops out of the EROI. A lot of the economies of scale and learning economies to come in complex mechanisms like this will involve development of more effective equipment to produce the equipment and fewer mistakes in production requiring rework, to get higher throughput, but the bulk of the Energy Investment is in the materials embedded in the equipment, which do not scale with throughput ... so there is another addition to the commercial cost that is not part of the energy cost.

The place to look is hidden gotcha's in the energy inputs of the equipment itself. There is a series on EROI at the Oil Drum, the [ sixth in the series] looked at wave energy, for which there seems to be little information, but what information there is seems to be encouraging:

Net energy analysis of wave energy appears to be non-existent. One study (Banjeree et al 2006) reports life cycle emissions of 21.67 g CO2 per kWh and energy payback time of just over one year for the Pelamis off shore device. Therefore, with an expected lifetime of 15 years per device, the Pelamis could be a sustainable net energy producer with an EROI of nearly 15:1. It is not known how much this would be reduced by including maintenance and other costs. This analysis does not account for the small scale of wave energy production and the inability to demonstrate significant commercial production to date.

While maintenance and installation may have higher Energy Investment than a Wind Farm, it would seem implausible that it will be more than two times the energy input into the snake, so a NEROI of 300% or better seems to be a reasonably safe bet.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.