- I'm just about to jump on a zoom call with Inna Braverman.
She is the CEO and Co-founder of Eco Wave Power,
which is an Israel based Wave Energy Company.
- Sometimes in order to really make something work,
you need to be thinking outside of the box.
Wave Energy is the most predictable source
has much higher potential, let's say than solar,
because it also works at night.
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- Could you tell me a bit about your,
what you were like as a child,
what you enjoyed studying at school
and, yeah, start from there.
- I live in Israel, but I wasn't born here.
I was born in Ukraine back then it was USSR.
Two weeks after I was born,
the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded,
which was the worst in history, nuclear disaster.
I was one of the babies that got hurt in the explosion.
I actually had respiratory arrest and the clinical death.
And then luckily, my mother is a nurse.
So she came to the crib on time
and they gave me a mouth to mouth resuscitation
which saved my life until the ambulance came.
I always feel like, wow, there's must be something special
if I got a second chance in life,
the way I really decided to devote my second chance
to doing something good.
One of the main reasons for my passion
towards renewable energy, I do think that harnessing clean
safe electricity is definitely a good cause.
But of course, I didn't know it as a baby.
And so when actually I went to study
in Haifa university political science,
because I thought that maybe the best way
to really make a positive change
in the world is through politics.
When I finished my university
there was no lineup of politicians waiting to hire
a Political Science Major.
So that didn't go as planned.
I did start working for a renewable energy company
and there, I discovered the benefits
of solar energy, wind energy, wave energy
but nobody was really able to make
a commercialized wave energy technology.
And that really drew me to the,
that was kind of the beginning of Eco Wave Power.
- Okay, but you didn't study engineering or science
or anything like that.
So that's a really bold move to move
into founding a technology company without that background.
- Sometimes in order to really make something work
you need to be thinking outside of the box.
I really don't think that the person should necessarily have
and let's call it the education
in a certain field in order to make it a success.
If we look let's say at an entrepreneurial type person
like Jack Ma that they founded Alibaba
which became very successful.
He's a teacher.
So it doesn't definitely has anything to do
with programming, computers, softwares, and stuff.
- Maybe it takes somebody who doesn't have that background.
You don't have that kind of like
maybe even emotional attachment to the old technology.
Maybe it's easier to start, start fresh in a new direction.
Do you think that that's been the case for you?
- I'm not the engineer behind the system
because really engineers have a tendency not to want to
go out with the product to the world
until they feel that it's perfect.
And to be honest, they never feel that it's perfect.
The fresh eye really helped me.
- But it's very, it's hard for an engineer to put out
something that you think isn't perfect.
So I can say that your team of engineers would benefit
from having you to provide that kind of push.
Could you talk a bit about what are some
of those common challenges that with early wave companies?
- I think that the first generation
let's call it of wave energy maybe it was the,
I'll say it on the positive note, was a bit too courageous
and they wanted to start one with the most complicated.
Off-shore, needed big depth that middle of the ocean,
crazy high prices, right?
Because you need cheap divers within under water,
moving under water, cables.
On top of that you have in the off-shore waves of 20 meters
and even higher and no man made
stationary equipment can survive.
They were so excited about this 20 meter wave height off-shore.
about these huge waves that they said
let's go and harness it.
And you know, and then mother nature said no.
If we look at other industries that are already
commercialized, let's say wind industry,
they started with onshore wind,
got it commercialized, got the prices down,
learnt, made a lot of mistakes, learned a lot of things.
And only when they felt completely comfortable
and the industry was already stable
they went to put offshore windmills.
Their attempts were very valuable and also for my company
and also for other companies to learn, to understand.
So we kind of learned from their mistake and we said
okay, so let's do what is simpler and cheaper and easier.
- Can you explain to me
how does the Eco Wave Power technology work.
- Floaters are being attached
like this then manmade structures
as I said, such that breakwaters, piers, jetties
and other types of structures.
The floaters are going up and down
with the movement of the waves.
They're pushing the hydro-cylinder
which transmits biodegradable fluid
into land located accumulators.
Pressure in the accumulators is being built,
the higher the wave, the higher the pressure
and this pressure turns the hydro-motor,
which is turning the generator
and through the inverter, the electricity goes to the grid.
- So is it a continuous output
or is it, you know, does it rise and fall with the waves?
- No, it's a continuous output during wavy time
because you have the accumulators and the accumulators
they basically smooth your output.
According to studies, wave energy is the
most predictable source has much higher potential,
let's say than solar,
because it also works at night.
- For the Eco Wave Power technology,
how much energy is produced per unit
or per maybe per meter of length that's installed.
- Let's say in a great location
we can then produce one megawatt
on let's say 50 to 100 meters linear Breakwaters.
- When you research wave energy on the internet
that's definitely the thing that you see over
and over again is people saying wave energy will never work
because it's too complicated
you know, wind and hydro, it's the moving air
the moving water that directly turns the turbine
and that's very efficient.
But I also know there's plenty of examples in engineering
of, you know, like an internal combustion engine
obviously it takes a lot
of components to translate a linear motion
into a rotational one,
so I wanted to hear your thought on that.
Is it reducing the potential of eventual efficiency
or do you think it's just a matter of getting
to that point of maturity where it becomes more efficient?
- I do think that having too many moving parts
especially in the water is a bad thing.
So I agree with the, with the comments in that regard
on the other hand, let's say technology like ours
handles this problem because we don't have a lot of
moving parts and they're not in the water.
And the only thing that is
in the water is the floater and the hydro-cylinder.
So the floater is pushing the hydro-cylinder
and then the rest
everything that's happening is happening on land.
So it's not complicated maybe using hydraulics
in wave energy, is something relatively new
but using hydraulics as hydraulics
our elevators work on hydraulics that our cranes work
on hydraulics and it's a very known and safe industry.
Everything is on land, no generator, no inverter
nothing is in the water.
So it's actually very, very simple.
- It's still obviously a harsh operating environment
with all the salt spray it's near the water
even if it's not in it. I know, off-shore wind
even though all the complicated stuff is
you know, a hundred meters up in the air
it's still very expensive to make
those components survive long enough compared
to the same thing on-shore.
So how do you address that?
What materials are you using
and do you need special hydraulics?
- There are special types of paints,
special type of different ingredients
that we use to provide corrosive protection.
It's not different than ships.
Although the available energy off-shore
is significantly higher than the available energy on-shore.
The exploitable energy is actually almost the same
in the off-shore and near-shore.
So we can actually take wave energy to the next step
and say, okay, not only that, we're not expensive
and we don't break down, which is good things to have
but not enough, but we can also produce large amounts
of electricity and become profitable.
And that would really position wave energy like
okay, it's a serious source of electricity.
- What size these projects, both the ones that you've done
and the future ones, how many megawatts?
- The project there in Israel is the same size
as the project we are running in Gibraltar, it's 100 kilowatts
at first phase and then to be expanded more in the future,
and in Portugal the plan is to, to have
up to a 20 megawatt power station
which is already a big scale for wave energy.
It has never been there in the past.
- Wow, I have to admit, I was expecting it
to be a lot smaller than that
because I know, there's more energy off-shore
and I know that must be why they took
that difficult problem on, early on in wave energy
because there's so much more energy there before,
yeah, when it comes into shore, it obviously loses energy
from the sea floor and breaking waves.
So there's still, yeah, it sounds like there's still a lot
of power left by the time it gets to the breakwater.
So how do you, where do you see the place for wave energy?
- First of all, the wave energy potential is tremendous.
Two thirds of the world's population are living
on the coastline.
So with this type of population distribution,
the need for wave energy, is undeniable.
Other than that, according to the World Energy Council
wave energy can produce twice the amount
of electricity that the world produces today.
And the density of the water is about 832 times greater
than the density of air, which means
you can produce much larger electricity amounts
with much smaller thus cheaper devices.
We do need to incorporate all the sources.
It's not like a competition between the sources
that one is better than the other.
Some countries are more sunny,
some countries are more windy, some countries are more wavy.
And I do think that the solution for the world
is really incorporating all of these sources together.
And then we could really have 100%
environmentally friendly world.
- Do you think that wave energy is going to be cheaper
than the others or the same price
as the other renewable options, eventually?
- We're already comparable
to the price of wind and we can definitely compete
with even lower prices in the near future.
- Okay; so if the cost is already there
then what's the reason why we don't already see a tonne
of wave energy projects just there isn't,
the demonstrated reliability or, why don't we have queues of people --
- That's actually a great question.
We have a very unique situation where
the technology is already there,
but the policies, the legislation,
the feed-in tarrifs,
all the support mechanisms that are needed
to kind of instill a new technology
into a country are not existent.
Lobbying and discussion
with the government and to agree on the policies
can sometimes take three to four years.
- Okay.
- That's a very actually sad situation where the
technology is getting there or is already there
and there's no policies
and legislation and frameworks to support it.
And we saw the same happening by the way, with wind
and solar 25 and 30 years ago, when you just started
like, there's no policy there's no path
so they need to kind of come up
with a completely new legislation policy for you.
And then they sign and that's a bit unfortunate.
But I do think that it will change in the near future.
- Certainly you've got a very interesting technology
and it sounds like the future is going
to be exciting for you.
- Definitely, I'm super excited
and I really want to make this happen
because it will have impact, even the research we're making
will have impact on the future generations.
And that's a very good thing.
- Thanks so much.
I really, really learned a lot.
- Thank you for your time and your lovely interview.
- Okay, well, enjoy the rest of your day.
- Okay, thank you, bye bye.
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