waves

The European Union will consider whether a massive wave energy project from Scotland should receive a piece of a renewable-energy and carbon reduction project fund that could total billions of euros.

The Pentland Orkney Wave Energy Resource (POWER) project was nominated this week by the U.K. government for the NER300, a fund managed jointly by the European Commission, European Investment Bank, and member states that's named after the 300 million carbon "allowances" being sold to raise the funds.

If approved, funded, and built, the wave energy farm would be the largest grid-connected wave energy farm in the world, according to the Scottish European Green Energy Centre.

The POWER project as currently proposed would place 24 wave energy converters from Pelamis Wave Power and 10 Oyster 3 wave energy converters from Aquamarine Power in the Orkneys off the coast of Scotland. They would tie in to the Scottish electric grid and, together, they would make up a 28-megawatt wave power farm.

The Pelamis wave energy converter is a floating serpentine machine made up of multiple sealed cylinders that each contain power modules, hydraulic cylinders, and motor generators. The cylinders are connected by two-direction hinged joints. Jostling by the motion of ocean waves in relation to the hinges enables the machine to generate electricity, and transfer it by subsea cable.

The submerged Oyster, meanwhile, is shaped like an oyster shell that opens and closes from wave motion. It uses that energy to pump a hydro-electric turbine back on land to produce electricity.… Read more

I've owned, listened to, and reviewed a lot of high-end CD players, but none of them sounded as good as PS Audio's PerfectWave Transport and Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) components.

The Transport uses a CD-ROM drive mechanism that "reads" and rereads the data on the CD as many times as necessary until a bit-perfect match is achieved. PS Audio's Web site says the CD's data is placed in a 64MB memory buffer as the music plays, so you're not directly listening to the CD. To prove that claim remove the disc from the Transport and the music will continue playing for approximately 30 seconds!

The Transport can also play high-resolution WAV files off DVDs, with sample rates up to 192-kHz with 24-bit resolution. I had a few of these DVDs on hand for this review, and the PerfectWave components really shined with high-resolution audio. … Read more

The AT&T iPhone 4 drops more calls than Verizon's model, yet customers of both carriers seem about equally satisifed, according to a ChangeWave Research study released yesterday.

Questioning a total of 4,068 mobile phone users in a survey completed March 28, ChangeWave found that 82 percent of the Verizon Wireless iPhone 4 owners polled and 80 percent of those using AT&T's iPhone 4 said they were very satisified overall. The Verizon iPhone has been on the market since February, when it ended AT&T's long run of exclusivity for the Apple … Read more

The ideas behind Google Wave, a real-time communication technology the Net giant ditched, are making something of a comeback as a collaboration tool in Google Docs and Gmail.

Google announced discussions in Google Docs today, a new ability to automate the communications part of collaborations. Google Docs already let multiple people edit a document at the same time and to append comments to a document, but the discussions feature advances those abilities.

For one thing, comments now can be hidden once they've been addressed, not just deleted, and they can be resurrected if necessary.

For another, comments are adorned … Read more

WAV files are the basic sound recording unit in Windows. Much larger than MP3s and similar portable digital audio formats, WAVs are also easier to edit, thanks to tools like WavePad Sound Editor from NCH, which specializes in audio and multimedia software. It's a compact but powerful and flexible tool for analyzing and editing WAVs or just about any kind of digital audio file. It's especially useful for cleaning up and editing transcribed LP records and other digitized analog audio recordings, but you can also add effects, analyze the sound, and more.

WavePad's interface is essentially a … Read more

As the iPad juggernaut continues with today's launch of the iPad 2, can any other tablet maker truly compete with Apple?

The odds seem to be against it, at least according to the results of a survey released yesterday by ChangeWave Research. Questioning more than 3,000 consumers last month, ChangeWave found that 27 percent of them plan to buy a tablet, 2 percentage points more than a similar poll found last November.

Among those eyeing a tablet, 82 percent said they'll opt for an iPad. That number compares with 4 percent looking into a Motorola Xoom, 3 … Read more

Ocean Power Technologies today said it has completed construction of a "workhorse" buoy designed to generate electricity from wave motion for utility-scale projects.

The company's PB150 PowerBuoy is about 150 feet from top to bottom, although most of the structure is underwater. It can generate a peak of 150 kilowatts of power and feed the grid in waves between 4.9 feet and 22.9 feet.

The plan is to deploy the PB150 later this year about 33 miles off the coast of Scotland, where the device was manufactured and has been tested in the European Marine … Read more

Scientists from Stanford University and the University of California at Davis have crunched the numbers and come up with a plan for how the world might economically and feasibly make the move to renewable energy in the next 20 to 40 years.

In a two-part paper (Part 1 PDF, Part 2 PDF) published in the journal Energy Policy, Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi show in great detail the who, what, where, and how of implementing a renewable energy-run world. It includes solutions to economic, material, and transport issues.

Jacobson, an atmospheric scientist and professor of civil and environmental … Read more

Google Wave is a collaborative tool that lets users merge e-mail, wikis, instant messaging, and social networking. Users can create meetings, to-do lists, polls, discussions, and much more, making it possible to collaborate online almost as easily as you do in person. You can keep up with the latest activity in Wave with Google Wave Notifier, a Chrome extension that alerts users to new Wave updates.

The extension installs easily and appears to the right of Chrome's address bar as a small version of the wiggly Wave W icon. When there are updates to your Wave account, a number … Read more