Oh finally! The government’s price was finally revealed in the last paragraph of this piece of publicity stunt: 12.5 million for a single “potential” 1.25 Megawatt offshore generator.
No connection to shore power. No cabling, Tidewater access roads and towers. Transformers and rectifiers or inverters or battery storage devices so what little energy is created at random tides can be provided “when it is actually needed” back on shore.
I have worked on pump motors bigger than 1.25 Megawatt. Worked on local ponds with 1930-era hydrogenerators in a mill pond of 12 Megawatt capacity. Ten times this thing.
And you can fish or swim in that little lake under the trees.
The salt water impact on all ocean based generating equipment is significant. Tidal and wave forces are unceasing, that is true, but the equipment life would be very compromised by sea water in every case. The MARS project off Venice is a good example and it doesn’t generate any energy.
Thanks to Robert A Cook PE for finding the real information of this project, showing that there's not much there there. I'll focus on the cost. This comes out to $10 per Watt, or $10,000 per kilowatt! Then you get into the fact that it has moving parts (more chance for failure), and repairs are done out on the water (making repairs cost way more than repairs on land).
Compared to my solar panels costing me $1,000 per kW (probably would have been $700 per kW if the solar tax credit didn't exist and artificially inflate the price I had to pay).
“No connection to shore power. No cabling, Tidewater access roads and towers. Transformers and rectifiers or inverters or battery storage devices so what little energy is created at random tides can be provided “when it is actually needed” back on shore.”
The dollar figure is for the project which includes grid connection but that figure sounds low.