Wave Energy for Dummies

wave power generation buoy

Every once in a while we like to visit old friends, by which we mean "people we already know are dumbasses." Today's one of those days, and our "old friend" is the one and only Joan Whetzel, whose name is already on the DotD winners list more times (twenty-three) than Henri Richard's is on the Stanley Cup (eleven). Today, Joan will tell the world all about "How Is Wave Energy Used to Generate Electricity?"¹ Her work, such as it is, can be found at Sciencing.com (do you have any idea how much we dislike that name?)...

We polled the scientists in-house at the Antisocial Network and decided that the simplest answer to that question would have to touch on how generators work, i.e., wire(s) moving through a magnetic field. In one scenario, moving water would move the wires while the magnet stayed stationary or vice versa. But before she could get to the nitty-gritty stuff, Whetzel had to introduce her topic – and the fun begins with her first sentence (one that should never have made it past a content editor...):

"Earth is composed mainly of bodies of water---about 71 percent of the earth's surface is water."

Well, no, Joan, the Earth is not "mainly of bodies of water": the volume of Earth's free water is approximately 333 million mi³, but the total volume of the planet is 260 billion mi³; so water accounts for about 1/10th of 1% of the Earth. Not a good start...

Whetzel also has math problems (or perhaps just proofreading problems): "The kinetic energy of the typical 4-foot, 10-second wave produces greater than 35,000 horsepower (26099.50 kW) of power for every mile of coastline. That's enough power to light one 100-watt light bulb for 260,095 hours, or about 30.8 years." No, Joan, that's 260,995 hours or about 29.8 years. But those are just quibbles; it's when Whetzel attempts to explain electrical generation that things get downright silly:

"Three methods are used to generate wave energy. With the first, a system of buoys rises and falls with the waves, causing an electric generator to produce electricity that is propelled along a power cable to shore."

"Propelled"? is she kidding with that verb? And how does this work, anyway, Joan? All Whetzel did was reword a brief description of three possible generation methods at the Ocean Energy Council (which was almost as hilarious: that article said that electricity is "shipped" ashore). It's obvious that all she did was reword and reorder the skimpy information she found at that website and, her other references notwithstanding, came out of the process knowing exactly what she knew when she entered it: nothing. That's made obvious by her claim that "there are no moving parts to wear out" -- which, as anyone who knows anything about electrical generation will tell you, is utter bullshit.

And there you have it: a freelancer who did nothing but reword an article written by another freelancer. At least the first one had (in theory) direct access to people who know the topic; Whetzel's third-hand information isn't worth the electrons it's printed on. Hence, her twenty-fourth Dumbass of the Day award: still champion!

¹ The original has been sent to the rewrite team by Leaf Group (we'll check it later), but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   sciencing.com/wave-energy-used-generate-electricity-6499297.html

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