Exploring waves as renewable energy source in West Africa

An Isreali-based company, Yam Pro Energy is set to build a wave-energy plant on the coastline of Accra, Ghana’s capital city.

The company plans to navigate the challenges of developing a technology that can withstand the sea’s harsh environment with minimum disruption to the ecosystem by using machinery that will crash waves to harvest hydraulic pressure and turn it into electricity.

Yam Pro Energy’s CEO, Zeev Peretz told CNN that their technology was much more efficient than other renewable energy sources because it can generate 65 percent of energy per year, compared to solar panels and wind turbines which generate between 22-24 percent.

“The demand (for energy) is very big and I think it will help people (improve) their life.”

“Floaters” will be connected to wave breakers on the coastline and will bob up and down as waves crash in.

Wave energy is produced when electricity generators are placed on the surface of the ocean. Energy provided is most often used in desalination plants, power plants and water pumps.

Energy output is determined by wave height, wave speed, wavelength, and water density. To date there are only a handful of experimental wave generator plants in operation around the world.

With 71 per cent of the earth covered in water, experts say there is a growing interest to exploit the vast potentials of the natural resource.

“There’s so many wave power companies and as many different devices, so finding one that actually works best is trial and error,” said Mark Jacobson, who is a Stanford University professor and director at The Solutions Project, a company which aims to help the world move to 100 percent renewable energy.

According to Renewable Northwest, a regional non-profit renewable energy advocacy group in the United States, wave, tidal and ocean energy technologies are just beginning to reach viability as potential commercial power sources.

While just a few small projects currently exist, the technology is advancing rapidly and has huge potential for generating power, the group states.

Africa, the world’s second-largest continent with 11,677,239 square miles (30,244,049 square km), is bounded by the Atlantic, Indian and Southern oceans, as well as by the Red and Mediterranean seas.

The continent straddles the equator and sits between the landforms of southern Europe and Asia, giving it a complex coastal geography and a wide range of sea conditions

To the west, Africa has its longest coastline with the Atlantic Ocean. The continent borders on both the North and South Atlantic, from roughly the location of Cape Town to Gibraltar.

West Africa’s position around the Atlantic Ocean with coastlines in major city centres like Lagos, makes it uniquely positioned to take advantage of wave as renewable energy source.

According to Yam Pro Energy, the advantages of wave power, is that their machines do not emit pollution, waves are more predictable than other renewable sources and despite the original set up being costly, the running and maintenance costs are low.

“If the waves are too high we are given forecasts days ahead which helps to analyse the situation,” Peretz said.

While construction in Accra will not begin until well into 2017, Yam Pro Energy has already secured the coastline to build its power station.

It has also teamed up with local partners, secured its power purchase agreement (PPA) from the Ghana’s electrical company and has been given space on the grid so it can sell the energy produced.

The company has said upwards of 10,000 households will benefit from the project.

Jacobson, from The Solutions Project, supported the development of wave technology in Ghana, but told CNN that its growth won’t be as rapid as solar and wind.

“While there’s a reasonable resource of wave power to exploit, if you’re comparing it to other technologies it’s just not going to be penetrating as much,” he said.

Instead, it will compliment other renewable energy technologies. “It’s definitely worthwhile doing, we should invest (in it) as much as we can.”

The Solutions Project predicts that if Ghana can transition to 100 percent clean, renewable energy by 2050, wave energy will account for 1.4 per cent of it.

And while that may seem small, Jacobson insisted it was not. “The amount of energy worldwide is enormous. So something that is large is actually small in comparison to the power demand worldwide.”

He said there was “no downside” in transitioning into a world which only uses renewable energy.

“These countries can become more energy independent. There’s less risk of conflict, less terrorism because there’s fewer centralized plants and you solve the climate problem simultaneously.”

Little environmental impact

A scientific research paper written by Collins Nwokocha and Abayomi Layeni on ocean wave energy as option for Nigerian power situation posits that harnessing wave power does not cause large carbon dioxide emissions, which would allow it to play an important role in counteracting the threats of global warming.

The duo observed that there are no dangerous and harmful by-products which are comparable to the radioactive waste produced at nuclear power plants.

“As with any interactions between humans and the rest of the natural world there is however, an impact on the environment some aspect of which being negative though not all (offshore devices, for example, could help reduce coastal erosion as is the case with the Bar Beach at Victoria Island, Lagos”, according to the research paper.

The researchers stated that the construction of large offshore devices could have serious consequences for wave patterns and sedimentation rates. In areas in need of coastal protection this may be of benefit. The impact on drift patterns and secondary effects on the local ecology will be the main point in further research and study of these devices

Big possibilities

According to the research work, at its present stage of development wave power is an ideal energy source for small scale utilisation such as Island communities and oil rigs on the ocean.

Development of this renewable energy source will help save fossil fuels currently being used by such communities.

Lagos and other highly populated part of the country are close enough to the ocean to benefit from this form of energy, thus reducing greatly the cost of using fossil fuel.

Large scale harnessing of wave energy will be made a reality within the next ten to fifteen years and this will be possible if sufficiently large resources are made available now to a strategically planned programme for Nigeria so as to develop her own wave technology.

It is noteworthy that in Ghana, the country’s electricity policy makes it possible for the energy developers to wheel the power to the grid and sell to thousands of people in need, other West African countries will benefit with the adoption of similar regulations.

Samuel Ukwuaba, Head, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Petroleum Training Institute, Effurum, Delta State while advocating for increased attention to wave energy said the benefits are numerous.

He noted that once built, tidal power is free; it produces no greenhouse gases or other wastes; it needs no fuel; it produces electricity reliably; it’s not expensive to maintain, tides are totally predicable and offshore turbines and vertical-axis turbines are not ruinously expensive to build and do not have large environmental impact.

ISAAC ANYAOGU