I recall seeing people at an open day at the facility when it was located on North Mole Drive, directly adjacent to the water. The small spherical buoys tethered to the sandy sea bed by simple concrete blocks, pumped water into a device ashore which produced fresh water, somehow. You can still see remnants of steel pipes on the rock wall and even one of the later BA’s in the yard - on Google Maps. Few years ago you could see the small BA’s in the water about 100m off the rock wall.
The open day presentation to visitors and politicians showed water squirting from a pipe, and people drinking from plastic water bottles, allegedly produced earlier by the CETO process.
That was sometime around 2010 or earlier.
At the 2008 AGM I spoke to Mr Burns, the inventor, and specifically asked him how the BA’s would be anchored to the sea bed. He replied that they would very simply be anchored using a lump of concrete with a concave base so that it formed a suction to the sea bed. Simple and cheap. Just make the concrete size and weight appropriate to the size of the BA!
But now, in 2018, after numerous wave testing buoys and uni research into suitable anchoring devices about which we hear bugger all, we are floundering – like a wave buoy.
K
CCE Price at posting:
1.8¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Held
