KILOWAVES Mad scientists want to turn waves into light   January 25, 2002 Well-lit bathrooms and inspiring trash TV are a good enough reason to keep paying those hefty electric bills. However, sadly enough, energy has become increasingly hard to come by these days. Many people are going back to using gas lamps, blackouts have become a frequent nuisance and -- shock, horror -- just the other night teenagers in Riverside County missed a whole episode of Temptation Island when power was inadvertently turned off in their suburb. Thankfully though, an enlightened bloke called Asfaw Beyene is working hard to prevent such somber things from happening again. Beyene, who, by the by, is an engineering professor at SDSU, believes the answer to our neon problems comes from the sea. And the solution, he says, is Wave Generators. "As you can imagine, the motion of the ocean contains tremendous power," Beyene told The San Diego Union-Tribune in a recent interview. "We want wave-energy technology to be recognized as one of the practical, renewable forms of energy. We'd like to have equal footing with other forms of renewable energy conversion." Beyene and his research team are seeking a $120,000 grant from the California Energy Commission to study the viability of using ocean swells as a renewable energy source. His funding request is expected to be voted on by the commission in early February. According to the scientist, his team wants to pinpoint the best sites -- both on the beach and offshore -- to build the power stations. The study also intends to evaluate how floating power stations might affect shipping lanes and commercial fishing activity, and whether generators along the beach could be designed to be aesthetically pleasing to beach goers in general. However, you should probably know that Beyene's idea is not exactly new. As we speak, there are wave generators cranking out power in many countries, including Japan, Australia and the United Kingdom. The most successful wave plant to date, which opened in November 2000, is on the small Scottish island of Islay. The 500-kilowatt wave-power station, capable of lighting roughly 400 homes, produces energy at 7.5 cents per kilowatt-hour. (Burning coal costs 2.6 cents per kilowatt-hour.) Not an impressive number, admittedly, but it's not like Scotland's got waves like Maverick's in its backyard, either. (One can only imagine the power-generating might of a 100-foot bomb like the one that went unridden in Mav's last month.) According to a Pacific Gas & Electric Co. 1991 research, the swells off Northern California could potentially generate up to 10,500 megawatts of electricity, enough to supply more than 20 percent of the state's energy demand. However, that's apparently not enough to convince the PG&E experts. According to the same study, only 20 percent of the energy in waves could actually be harvested because of technological and environmental obstacles. Beyene's people are not buying it, though. Avid to prove PG&E wrong, his research team wants to re-evaluate those numbers and make a more precise estimate of just how much power can be produced along California's 1,100-mile coastline. Enough electricity, one would hope, to keep those Riverside kids amused on a boring Thursday night. -- Vince Medeiros