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It may not be too long before you will be powering your home using electricity generated by ocean waves.

AquaBuOY 3.0 is a product of Finavera Renewables (Stock Ticker FNVRF.PK), a small Canadian company which started in 2005.  It is a floating buoy structure, about 40 tons in weight and 75 feet long. Once placed in the ocean, water collects inside the buoy and is pressurized. The pressurized water is passed through a turbine and the electricity generated is sent to shore through a standard underwater cable.

Finavera CEO Jason Bak is a member of the Clinton Global Initiative, the former US president’s coalition of world and business leaders. As part of the initiative, Finavera Renewables has committed to developing a 20MW wave energy project in South Africa.

In December 2007, California’s Pacific Gas & Electricty Company signed North America’s first wave energy power purchase agreement with Finavera. Through this, they will receive close to 4000 MWh of clean, renewable electricity.

The World Energy Council recently released estimates showing how ocean energy could supply twice as much electricity that the world now consumes. Basically, a combination of Hydro, Nuclear, Natural Gas, Oil, Coal, and Renewables can produce 17,500 Terawatts, whereas Wave power has the potential to produce twice that amount, almost 35,000 Terawatts.

 Watch this Video to see how AquaBuOY works!

Last night I watched a documentary on the National Geographic channel that was really scary, and really well made. Called “Six Degrees Could Change The World”, it talked about and showed in stunning HD video how the impact of increasing ocean temperatures will affect life on Earth. In the past 100 years, ocean temperatures have already risen 0.8 degrees Celcius and if mankind does not do enough to protect the environment, within ten years (ten years!) it could get to a point where temperature increases become irreversible and then we’re all in for a lot of trouble.

Degree by degree, the show depicted how the Amazon river will dry up and the rain forests will disappear, how the Himalayan Glaciers have already noticeably started melting since 1968, and ultimately, if the ocean temperature goes up by six degrees, how coastal cities like New York will flood under 25 feet of water, how hundreds of millions of people will have to move to safer places, and the havoc that will create on the world’s social structure - sheer chaos, if not completely wiping out the human race!

To believe or not to believe…that is the question. Apparently there is factual research behind this prediction. Other people say global warming is a natural occurence and whatever damage we are doing to the earth, it will fix itself over thousands of years so don’t worry about it. To top it all for me, I actually had a nasty dream last night (a few hours after I watched the show) in which I was in a flooded city and a few friends and I were trying to escape somehow, and in the distance we saw a huge mass of people walking through a dry landscape - probably migrating as per the visuals I saw on the show. Ugh!

Anyways, I’ve put together a couple of links here which seem helpful in understanding this issue better:

GlobalWarming.Org - Public Debate FAQ’s ,   Climate Change Kids Site ,  WWF Passport