The Oil Drum

This is the final piece of a series on Energy Return on Investment from Professor Charles Hall's EROI Workshop at SUNY. Today's papers outline the energy technologies of wave and geothermal power, concluding a 5 part series that has looked at Why EROI Matters, Natural Gas and Imported Oil, Tar Sands and Shale Oil, Nuclear Power, and Passive Solar, Photovoltaic, Wind, and Hydro-electric. Previously, Professor Hall also wrote the thought provoking, At $100 Oil, What Can the Scientist Say to the Investor. Forget not about the simple 'balloon graph' below of EROI x Scale for fossil and renewable energy sources that this project is attempting to update with the help of theoildrum.com readership.

Pelamis is a greek word that means sea serpent. I guess it is the best definition for what I was shown today, a metal serpent riding the waves, harvesting its energy.

A presentation of the pilot project was held here at school, directed to the Hydraulic Engineering students, but open to the general public. The speakers were from Enersis, the company promoting this first full materialization of such technology. I couldn't miss it.