"Swell magnet stokes support for wave power"

news @ nature.com

"Hugh-Peter Kelly, the founder of Trident Energy, a small British company based in Southend-on-Sea, thinks his system might crack previous problems and allow wave energy to come of age.

His invention uses the up and down motion of a floating buoy to move an electrical coil along a stack of magnets, which generates an alternating current in the coil.

'At a stroke you get rid of all the hydraulics that the rotary generators used by other wave power devices need,' says Kelly. This should make the device relatively cheap and reliable, he says. And as the generator only moves up and down it takes up very little space, so a number of them could be crammed into a small area."