Wave Power Conundrums: Wave Group Reports

In response to the 1973 oil crisis, Professor Stephen Salter (1938 – 2024) nudged the UK Department of Energy into funding wave power research. This led to the 1974 Wave Energy Programme, which funded several designs of wave energy device. Due to political unpopularity, funding of specific devices was abruptly and controversially terminated in 1983. During the years that followed, the Edinburgh Wave Power Group worked on projects for generic technologies. In the absence of academic funding, there was also more focus on commercialisation of technologies that had been developed during the funding programme, such as wave makers and digital hydraulics pumps.

Professor Salter’s research lab, ‘the Portacabin’, had copies of all the documents associated with the Edinburgh Wave Power Project. As a PhD student, these reports were revered artefacts. They all had a particular look about them, even those authored by his researchers a decade after the end of the funding programme. Access involved knocking on the Portacabin door; promising to put them back into the right place; etc. A few years ago, Professor Salter decided to make this collection available to the wider world via the Edinburgh Research Archive. I had promised a link from my blog, but I didn’t get around to this, as I was disturbed by subsequent additions to the archive that weren’t part of the Portacabin collection. To get around this, here are the links to the archive items that I associate with the Portacabin. It’s worth looking at the main archive page if you wish to search by author or subject.