While wind and solar energy are the two most viable clean alternatives to the dirty energy sources that power most of our society, the energy that can be harvested from ocean waves also has a lot of potential as an infinitely renewable source.
However, the technology is still developing, and a new research tool may play a big part in helping it get there, Interesting Engineering reported.
The new device, the marine and hydrokinetic toolkit, was developed jointly by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories. It offers validation and standardized analysis tools to help researchers figure out whether their wave energy-gathering technologies are going to be viable without forcing them to undergo expensive and difficult real-world testing.
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The tool was deployed in 2020 and has been used by around 29,000 researchers.
"Before, most [marine renewable energy] developers were forced to build their own tools for data processing and analysis," said Andrew Simms, a data scientist at NREL and one of the developers of the tool. "Now, MHKiT gives everyone a head start on data analysis. If we can make analysis as easy and painless as possible, developers can spend more of their time building better devices."
Unlike solar energy, which can only be harvested when the sun is shining, and wind energy, which can only be harvested when the wind is blowing, wave energy can be harvested at any time of day or night, which is one of the factors that makes it so attractive to clean energy scientists.
Now, using this powerful analytical tool, those scientists are closer than ever to unlocking a new source of virtually unlimited clean, renewable energy, which could power 22 million homes, according to Interesting Engineering.
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