Shark fins, kelp and whales have already been mimicked for tidal and wind power generation, and now anacondas get their time in the spotlight. Francis Farley, an experimental physicist, teamed up with Rod Rainey of Atkins Oil and Gas to invent a new device that harnesses wave power, but is made of inexpensive materials and is easy to maintain. They have named it the Anaconda because of the snake-like look.

The distensible rubber tube is closed at both ends and filled with water. One end faces the oncoming waves where the wave squeezes it and creates a bulge wave inside the tube. Bulge waves head down the tube, with the outside water accompanying it, pushing it along and causing the bulge wave to grow. Finally, the bulge wave flows past a turbine where energy is generated and fed to shore through a cable.

While only a prototype has been created so far, the inventors are getting back up from the University of Southampton, where lab experiments and studies will help the Anaconda scale up and become a reality. And by scale up, we mean big-time scale up. A fully grown Anaconda would be nearly 700 feet long and 23 feet in diameter, and would gather power from oceanic depths of 130 to 330 feet. But the size is equivalent to its output. One unit could produce 1 megawatt. That’s a lot of power from a big snake. And because the goal is to keep it cheap and easy to maintain, the hope is that the cost of electricity from the snake would only be $0.12 per kWh – a competitive price. Still, it will be about 5 years of testing before we see if the Anaconda pans out. See the Anaconda swim here.

Via Treehugger, University of Southampton, GreenCarCongress

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