Off the Oregon coast just south of Newport, large rounded swells rocked The Discovery from side to side, the waves nearly tipping the boat sideways.
Deep under the wobbling vessel, steel pipes carrying power and data cables stretched for a dozen miles buried along the seafloor, ready to capture the energy of those Pacific Ocean surges, known for their constancy, massive size and predictability.
The cables will soon connect to the local energy grid and hook up to wave energy converters at the first test site of its kind in the continental U.S. and one of only a handful worldwide.
The site puts Oregon at the forefront in the clean energy race to reduce fossil fuel emissions and help temper climate change. The technology, still in its infancy despite more than a decade of trial and error, isn’t yet commercially available anywhere in the world.
But proponents believe it can provide power both on and offshore, sending electricity to cars, ships, homes, desalination plants, aquaculture farms and floating ocean platforms, among others.
Developed and overseen by Oregon State University and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the site will allow developers to plug in and test wave energy converters in the open ocean to see if they can survive and continue to produce electricity during harsh Pacific Ocean storms.
The effort is different from the contentious offshore wind leases planned along the southern Oregon coast. The wave test site is experimental, has a smaller footprint and could directly benefit coastal economies. It also was developed with community input, winning local support.
“Wave energy is incredibly attractive as a future renewable power source,” said Bryson Robertson, director of the Pacific Marine Energy Center at Oregon State University. “Not only is it capable of generating power close to where we need it, but it can generate it at the time we need it and we can predict it. Which is very useful and powerful for meeting consumer demand.”
TAPPING THE POTENTIAL
The world has long eyed the ocean as an untapped, nearly infinite source of clean energy.
Over the past two decades, developers have worked on a plethora of converter devices to capture the ebb and flow of waves. And though many have failed, a recent push to refine the technology has reignited the wave gold rush.
The enthusiasm is partly due to the flexibility of waves when compared to other popular renewable energy sources.
Waves aren’t just powerful, they’re also steadfast and limitless, said Burke Hales, a professor at Oregon State University and the chief scientist at PacWave South, the new test site.
“It’s different from wind and solar because wave energy just keeps going and going,” Hales said. “It’s more reliable. It could become an essential part of a diversified energy portfolio.”
Waves are available when the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing.
In the Pacific Northwest, for example, wave energy’s generating capacity is at its highest in the winter when the sun is rarely seen as seasonal storms bring larger swells.
And while wind energy makes power only when the wind is blowing near the turbines, wave power relies on storms anywhere in the Pacific, which travel across the entire ocean with little loss of energy.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the United States has the potential to generate 2.64 trillion kilowatt-hours of ocean energy – that’s equivalent to 63% of the nation’s total utility-scale electricity generation in 2023.
Harnessing the power of waves is also more efficient because 40% of the globe’s population, or about 3.5 billion people, live within 100 miles of a coast. Generating energy at the coast – rather than shipping it from inland – reduces the need for costly infrastructure, said Robertson, the Pacific Marine Energy Center director. A partnership between Oregon State, the University of Washington and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the center focuses on studying and advancing marine energy, including wave, tidal, in-river and offshore wind technologies.
“One of the most efficient things we can do is generate energy where we need it, instead of generating it far away and using transmission lines and other infrastructure to carry that power to the demand centers,” he said. “So there’s a huge benefit in being able to capture energy in the ocean really close to where people need the power.”
SOME DRAWBACKS
But there are a few caveats.
The ocean is a harsh environment. Seawater corrodes metal cables and other equipment. Barnacles, algae and seaweed take over the infrastructure.
The sheer force of water can be so destructive that it’s unclear whether many of the devices now in development can survive massive Pacific winter storms or continue to generate electricity while battered by towering swells.
Getting to the wave energy converters for maintenance and technology upgrades is also more limited than for on-shore renewable resources such as solar arrays and wind turbines. Winter sea conditions aren’t safe for people to work in the open ocean. Boats and specialized equipment mean higher costs
“Commercial-scale wave energy is about 20 years behind wind,” Hales said.
Wave energy also isn’t suitable and cost-effective for all coastal locales; it relies on waves that are large and consistent. It also requires access to power grid infrastructure onshore, which isn’t available in some coastal areas.
A 2020 study from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found that the Washington and Oregon coastlines hold the most promising West Coast areas or “hotspots” to pull power from ocean waves. The East Coast isn’t a prime candidate because the Atlantic Ocean has smaller waves.
Another limitation: Very few wave energy test sites exist across the world, so developers don’t have a lot of options when it comes to testing.
Most notable sites outside of Oregon’s include the European Marine Energy Centre in the Orkney Islands, an archipelago off the north coast of Scotland, and the U.S. Navy’s Wave Energy Test Site on Oahu.
UNIQUE SITE
Oregon’s test site will be one-of-a-kind once it launches next summer.
The new 2-square-mile area has obtained all the state and federal permits to operate and developers can test their converters without much bureaucracy to start.
The site is also larger than the others and can send a lot more electricity back into the grid, Hales said. (The university already runs a shallower test site, PacWave North, two miles off the coast of Newport, but it isn’t connected to the grid and can be used only to test prototypes or smaller-scale converters.)
Oregon’s new test site also offers more extensive monitoring and has harsher ocean conditions than Hawaii’s, which developers prefer to use to see how their technology works in bigger waves that generate more power, Hales said.
More than a decade in the making, Oregon’s site will cost roughly $100 million, said Hales, double the $48 million original estimate. And that’s not counting the price of developing energy converters.
Last week, Hales took reporters on The Discovery, an educational tour boat, to catch up with the project.
Much of the cable is already in place, he said, with construction set to wrap up next month.
Crews on land and specialized vessels have drilled and laid four pipes carrying power and data cables from an underground vault beneath the parking lot of Driftwood Beach State Park to the test site. The pipes start under the beach and the seafloor and then fan out in covered trenches to the testing site.
The site is 7 miles due west offshore, but entails 12 miles of cables because it’s angled from the beach. There, developers will have access to four testing “berths” where they can attach up to 20 wave energy converters to the cables. The devices will take the power of the waves and convert it into electricity. The cables will transmit that electricity to the vault on shore.
From the vault, another set of cables will carry the electricity about a third of a mile to a facility hooked up to the electrical grid. That’s where the electricity must be conditioned, meaning cleaned up, because the output of wave energy converters may have a different voltage, frequency or other parameters that make it unsuitable to send directly to the local grid.
Once conditioned, the electricity can be sent to the Central Lincoln People’s Utility District and distributed to users.
“We can use the test site as a sandbox, if you will, to demonstrate to potential customers, clients and partners what our device can do in the ocean for them,” said Reenst Lesemann, CEO of C-Power, one of the companies that will use PacWave to test its energy converter.
“That’s a big part of the commercialization for us,” he said, “and it’s a wonderful demonstration opportunity.”
LACK OF OPPOSITION
Wave energy hasn’t attracted the pushback experienced by offshore wind, which has drawn intense opposition from Oregon fishermen, tribes and other coastal residents for what they say has been a rushed process that ignored local input.
Wave energy proponents took a different route. Test site planning took over a decade and OSU took time to consult with the fishing community, Heather Mann, executive director of Midwater Trawlers Cooperative, told The Oregonian/OregonLive. Fishermen helped identify potential test sites, she said, and chose one that didn’t affect underwater reefs or fishing areas.
“Fishermen had an authentic seat at the table,” said Mann, whose group continues to oppose offshore wind development. “So, we don’t have any real concerns about the wave energy project currently.”
University officials said the lack of opposition also stems from differences in infrastructure.
PacWave is a testing, research and educational site, not a commercial wave farm.
Its cables and monitoring devices are under water and many of the wave converters float on the ocean surface or are mostly submerged – so, unlike giant floating wind turbines, they won’t be visible from shore.
MYRIAD DEVICES
Over the past two decades, the state has seen several failed attempts to jump-start wave technology.
A prototype wave energy buoy off Newport leaked and sank. A converter that won a Department of Energy wave-energy competition failed to generate much power. And a developer who had built a massive wave energy buoy withdrew plans to develop the nation’s first big-scale wave energy park near Reedsport, saying it was too expensive and too complicated.
Today, the technology is still in the research and development phase, though it’s rapidly advancing. Hundreds of companies worldwide are racing to design wave energy converters, with the hope of testing them in labs and at test sites.
At the Oregon site, several developers will test or refine devices of various shapes, sizes and uses, with financial support from the Department of Energy.
California-based CalWave plans to try out its xWave at the site. It’s a fully submerged device that could serve isolated microgrids, including islands and other remote communities.
“After deploying at PacWave, we are planning to offer the commercial unit to disadvantaged communities currently suffering from energy poverty,” CEO Marcus Lehmann said.
The company has completed a successful 10-month open-ocean pilot off the coast of San Diego. Earlier this year, it was selected as the technology provider for a wave energy project at Yuquot, British Columbia, where the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation hopes to harness the power of waves to become energy-independent.
Another company, Virginia-based C-Power, plans to deploy its SeaRAY system at the Oregon site. Tested earlier this year at the Navy site in Hawaii, the device doesn’t feed into an on-shore grid but creates an autonomous offshore power system in the ocean that can provide electricity, energy storage and real-time communications to users in the open ocean.
“It’s like a power strip and an ethernet jack in the ocean, and our customers can plug whatever they want to plug into it. It could be data-gathering systems, robotics systems or defense and security technologies. It creates a minigrid in the middle of the ocean,” Lesemann said.
The company also is developing a larger, grid-connected converter. A number of such devices would form an offshore wave farm feeding electricity into the mainland grid, he said.
“I think PacWave will be a spark,” Lesemann said. “The industry is getting close.”
UNKNOWN IMPACTS
Much is still unknown about wave energy technology, including costs, long-term viability and impacts on marine life, fishing areas and shipping routes.
Those could include disruption of marine habitats and behaviors, entanglement in cables and electromagnetic fields generated by wave-energy installations.
In addition to operating the site and measuring the amount of electricity produced by developers, Oregon State researchers will monitor wave, current and wind conditions at the site and study impacts on marine life.
They’ll use hydrophones to listen to wave devices’ acoustic footprints. They’ll measure electromagnetic frequencies that could interfere with whales’ echolocation. They’ll watch for how cables, anchors and the converters themselves interact with fish, mammals and other organisms.
Ecologist Sarah Henkel, who has sampled data on seafloor conditions off Newport since 2010, said proxy tests at the smaller test site have shown little impact to marine life thus far.
One, for example, showed that attaching an anchored buoy – the type that would be used to attach wave energy devices to the seafloor – led to small changes in the surrounding sediment and the type of clams, worms and snails that lived there, but no changes to the behavior of fish or larger animals.
But Henkel cautioned that a lot more work is needed to track the technology’s effects on marine life.
“Even our test site will just be a couple devices at a time. So whatever potential impacts we measure would likely be small from an installation such as this,” she said. “And the question would remain, what would happen if we were to scale up?”
Those unknowns shouldn’t scare off wave energy development, OSU’s Robertson said.
“We need to be building the technology of the future, and it’s not good enough for us to say we’ve got two or three ways to decarbonize, like solar or wind,” he said. “There’s a huge amount of wave power out there, so we just need to figure out how to harness it. And yes, there are some challenges, but just being afraid of it doesn’t make sense.”
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