Nine years ago, a strange-looking machine was deployed off the coast of the Orkney Islands in Scotland. It rolled and wobbled with the waves, not standing rigid against them. That wobble had a purpose. The device, a 1 MW wave energy converter developed by Finnish company Wello Oy, was known as the Penguin, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's Tethys database. It was the culmination of years of earlier testing at the site, and in this latest form, it was designed to convert the chaos of the open ocean into electricity; for two years it did just that, through some of the roughest seas that Scotland could throw at it.
Why they call it the Penguin
