How Does Wave Energy Work?

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Steve Jones and I'm going to tell you a little about how wave energy works. The first thing to understand this, that the energy comes from the movement of the wave as the wave goes past the point through a various different types of energy that can be harness in this way, but here is an example of how you might take energy from a wave. As you can see as the wave moves in this direction, this point will go up and down. And as this go up and down, it will push this wheel so that it rotates in this direction. So the vertical movement here will produce a rotational movement here and a rotational movement is what you need to generate electricity. And this is important because most forms of energy are electrical energy that we're looking for. Another way is if we have two objects floating in the water in this way and they are connected together through a coupling here, then as the wave goes up and down, this actually are going to go up and down also. And that means that this coupling is going to flex in this way and by putting a ratchet device on it, it will act in the same way as this to rotate, to produce a rotation, which again will generate electricity. So this is basically how wave energy works. It works by creating a rotational movement from the vertical movement of the wave."