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Ocean Treader is a floating device. It will be tied up 1 – 2 miles offshore in ocean wave systems. It will not pose any obstruction on the shoreline. The theory has been put to test in wave tank. Now the company is producing a full size machine for offshore testing. Wave Treader has grown out of our work with Ocean Treader. Wave Treader uses its Sponsons and Arms and are mounted on the base of a static offshore structure. That structure can be a Wind Turbine or Tidal Turbine. By sharing the high infrastructure costs with another device, such as the foundation costs, cabling costs, etc., the economics of both devices are enhanced and the energy yield for a given sea area greatly improved.

Construction will start next week on the £42 million Wave Hub marine energy project in South West England.The Wave Hub, which will be located 10 miles off the north Cornwall coast, will serve as a test bed for wave energy devices by providing an electrical connection from the seabed at a depth of around 50 m to the national grid.Initially, the Wave Hub will have four berths for wave energy devices up to a maximum capacity of 20 MW, but has the potential to scale up to 50 MW in the future.Ocean Power Technologies has signed up to take the first berth when it becomes available to test the performance of its PowerBuoy wave energy converter.The first devices are expected to be deployed in 2011, once the cabling and connectors have been constructed. Starting on Monday, civil engineers will drill ducts from Cornwall coast at Hayle to connect to the subsea cable and a new electricity substation on the site of a former nearby power station.

Normally these academics would be fine without our fascination. They weren't looking for glory when they decided to study organisms most people either can't see or wish they hadn't. But when the Deepwater Horizon exploded in April 2010, our collective bias toward cute big creatures started to matter a great deal. That's because the instant the spill-cam was switched off and it became clear that there would be no immediate mass die-offs among dolphins and pelicans, at least not on the scale of theExxon Valdez spill deaths, most of us were pretty much on to the next telegenic disaster. (Chilean miners down a hole—and they've got video diaries? Tell us more!)

Mike Utsler, BP's Unified Area Commander, summed up its findings like this: "The beaches are safe, the water is safe, and the seafood is safe." Never mind that just four days earlier, more than 8,000 pounds of tar balls were collected on Florida's beaches—and that was an average day. Or that gulf residents and cleanup workers continue to report serious health problems that many scientists believe are linked to dispersant and crude oil exposure.

For the scientists aboard the WeatherBird II, the recasting of the Deepwater Horizon spill as a good-news story about a disaster averted has not been easy to watch. Over the past seven months, they, along with a small group of similarly focused oceanographers from other universities, have logged dozens of weeks at sea in cramped research vessels, carefully measuring and monitoring the spill's impact on the delicate and little-understood ecology of the deep ocean. And these veteran scientists have seen things that they describe as unprecedented. Among their most striking findings are graveyards of recently deceased coral, oiled crab larvae, evidence of bizarre sickness in the phytoplankton and bacterial communities, and a mysterious brown liquid coating large swaths of the ocean floor, snuffing out life underneath.

The task force recommendations include: creating a national database of survey data, with information from DECC, The Crown Estate and, at the appropriate time, developers - to reduce duplication and minimise cost and time introducing common standards in data collection and assessment to ensure developers can use methodologies consistently and with confidence using mandatory multilateral consultation to engage other sea users (fisheries, shipping, recreational users, communities, etc) at the earliest opportunity, before applications increasing resources in Marine Scotland (on cost-recovery basis) to provide required environment specialists for efficient scoping and application processes prioritising early work to identify potential sites for new test facilities, including deep water offshore wind technologies

Wave power alone has an estimated global potential of approximately 1,000-10,000 GW — in the same order of magnitude as the world’s electricity consumption. Located in the Orkney Islands of Northern Scotland, the wave and tidal sites are designed to test a range of machines located down to a depth of 50 meters and up to two kilometers from shore. “Wave and tidal energy is a very powerful source of renewable energy and a very challenging environment for equipment and systems,’’ stated Stuart Baird, EMEC Operations Director. “We need vendors like Draka who can deliver quality products and services that can stand up to the elements over time.”