Over the last three decades, the quest to develop wave energy has evoked enough imagination to fill the HG Wells novel. Inventors devised giant machines, similar to sea serpents and submarine launchers, to create giant mechanical oysters, and even “waves,” hoping to capture the energy of the waves and convert them into electricity. Dragon “was created.
Unfortunately, things didn’t go well with this character’s cast.
From Portland, Oregon to Porto, Portugal, from the Orkney Islands in Scotland to the Australian coast south of Sydney, these sea monsters died one by one. For a variety of reasons, dozens of pioneering wave energy prototypes have never been commercialized. And many young companies that created them liquidated their assets.
In 2017, the Orkney Islands Council purchased a snake-like Peramis ocean energy generator for £ 1 that failed three years after the manufacturer’s Peramis wave power plant was disbanded.
Bringing new renewable energy sources to market requires extensive research and development, and the ocean can be a difficult place to live. Brine is corrosive. A strong storm can damage the machine. It takes a lot of time and money to take the device outdoors just to test it.
Still, the long, confusing history of trial and error in this sector was not in vain. Ocean energy technologies powered by tidal currents, tides and waves are undergoing rapid innovation. And the government believes that ocean energy is increasingly important to achieve the 100% clean energy goal and the associated climate change goals.
There is only one active wave energy project in the United States, although it is a large project with a capacity of over 1 MW.
As a result, more public funding flows in for development, testing, and commercialization, including the United States, which lags behind Europe, the world’s leader in ocean energy, primarily due to limited public investment. doing. American wave energy start-ups and the federal government seem eager to catch up. And they seem to get the chance to try it soon.
The Ministry of Energy (DOE) funded $ 25 million in January to support eight wave energy projects that make up the first open water test at Oregon State University’s PacWave offshore facility. Scheduled to go live in the fall of 2023, PacWave will be the first grid-connected open ocean testing site in North America and will be an important stepping stone for the sector as it can be tested by entrepreneurs and researchers. You can use your device without going through a lengthy regulatory process.
Diagram of PacWave South, a pre-licensed development of PacWave.
“This is a big problem for the industry,” Bryson Robertson, director of OSU’s Pacific Ocean Energy Center, told GreenBiz. “It’s important to enable technology developers in the Americas and other parts of the world to actually test technology on a large scale without years of regulatory processes and associated controls and costs. They bring technology to us, deploy it, understand how they work, and get much of the data and performance characteristics they need as they move towards commercialization. increase.”
Is there no sunlight?no problem
Marine energy has stird the imagination because of its abundance and great potential. According to the National Institute of Renewable Energy (NREL), if all the ocean energy available along the coast of the United States (waves, tides, tides, temperature gradients) is available, it can provide enough power to supply more than half. increase. National electricity demand.
Of course, building marine energy facilities above and below the entire U.S. coastline to capture the power of all the last waves is not practically or ecologically responsible, but consider this: the country Total ocean energy resources are 2,300 terawatt hours per year, using only one-tenth of these resources will provide nearly 6% of the electricity used, power 22 million households, and 4 of the US coal fleet. You can reduce the amount by a factor of 1.
Marine energy can also help fill the gaps left by other renewable technologies. According to the DOE, the combination of wind and solar could supply 75% of the country’s electricity by 2035 and 90% by 2050. Proponents of wave energy can also help to provide the rest in a complementary way while reducing reliance on storage, as waves and tides are more predictable and reliable than the sun and wind. It is pointed out that there is. The waves are swayed day and night, and in the northern states it gets stronger in winter when there is significantly less sunshine.
Not only are these renewable energy technologies complementary to each other, but developers are beginning to look for ways to work together to share space. Hybrid projects aimed at attaching wave energy equipment to offshore wind farms or floating solar panels are already under consideration in Europe.
CalWave Power Technologies, one of the six DOE-funded companies and two universities in January, tested the design of wave energy converters for use in geographically distant and small area energy grids. Spent $ 7.5 million to do. Auckland-based startups are interested in adopting the technology alongside offshore wind, co-founder and CEO Marcus Lehmann told GreenBiz.
“We can take advantage of the electrical infrastructure of offshore wind farms and use the same infrastructure to export electricity to the grid,” says Lehmann. “The capacity factor of a very good offshore wind farm is 40-50%, which means that the equipment is used only at half of the annual capacity factor, and if the energy of the communal power plant is balanced. , Can increase the shared capacity factor to 90%. “
Blueprint for what you shouldn’t do
The EU is a world leader in tidal and wave technology, primarily due to the policies and early investments that helped guide them towards commercialization. Over the last decade, Europe has invested more than $ 414 million in research, development and innovation in ocean energy through various financing programs. The EU has also set a goal of introducing 100 MW of wave and tidal energy capacities by 2025. According to OceanEnergyEurope, as of last year, there was a pipeline of 17 projects that were “more than enough” to reach their goals.
By comparison, the United States is a large project with a capacity of over 1 MW, but there is only one active wave energy project. The project began in 2020 at the US Navy Wave Energy Experiment Station near Kaneohe, Hawaii. Until PacWave opens its doors, this site (which recently received a $ 6 million injection from the Navy) remains the only grid-connected wave energy testing site in the country.
The long and turbulent history of wave energy has provided businesses with a blueprint for how to do things, so to speak.
“Europeans are working on this and have invested for a long time,” Robertson said. “The United States is definitely catching up with Europeans, but we have the advantage of learning from them what they did and where they failed.”
Indeed, the long and turbulent history of wave energy has provided companies like Israeli startup Eco Wave Power with a blueprint for how to do things, so to speak.
Founded in 2011 in Tel Aviv by Inna Braverman when she was 24, the company designed onshore wave energy technology for breakwaters, piers, jetties, and other types of existing structures. EcoWave launched the first grid-connected commercial project in Gibraltar in 2016, working on the installation of the first grid-connected wave energy in Israel. There are also many other projects planned, including the installation of a grid-connected 1 MW in Portugal, which is part of the 20 MW Agreement.
Startup CEO Braverman told GreenBiz that she and co-founder David Leb studied the history of wave power development and basically did the opposite.
An now obsolete prototype of the Pelamis Wave Energy Converter in Scotland in 2007.
“When we founded EcoWavePower, we realized that without something cost-effective, reliable, insured, environmentally friendly, and easily connected to the grid, a business wouldn’t be possible,” she said. Said. “So we asked ourselves. How do we solve these problems? Basically, we decided to go in a completely different direction from the industry so far. They are much more. Since we went offshore, he said, “We go to the coast and land.” “”
Currently, the company is focusing on the United States. We started trading on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange in July. And in January, Eco Wave collaborated with AltaSea, a non-profit organization that works with blue economy start-ups, on a pilot project at AltaSea’s accelerator campus in the Port of Los Angeles.
“The United States is a very important target market for us, and from our experience, the best way to penetrate the market is to set up a pilot, or proof-of-concept project,” Braverman said. increase. “When talking to people from different countries, they say:’It’s great to have something in Israel or Gibraltar, but we have different waters, so everyone has their own backyard. I want to see something in. Technology. “
Road to commercialization
Increasing public funding and the PacWave test site should help move the US wave power sector to commercialization more quickly. However, due to technological advances, the design and development process of today’s start-ups is less complicated and less expensive than first-generation wave energy developers. For Balakryshnan “Balky” Nair, CEO of Oscilla Power in Seattle, this means that there is no real reason why these technologies are not cost-competitive.
“Designing a system that can capture a lot of energy required a lot of modeling and analysis hardware and software. These combinations were actually available within the last decade.” Nair told GreenBiz. “Until then, there was no computing power or method to accurately design and model these systems, so with older generations of technology, people were mostly the best guesses. We had to overdesign the system because it wasn’t. Knowing what to expect made the capital investment very high and couldn’t generate enough power. These systems do not reflect where the industry can reach. “
There is no fundamental reason why this technology must be more expensive than wind energy.
Oscilla received $ 1.8 million from DOE and designed Triton, a practical 1-megawatt wave energy system that can be connected to or disconnected from the power grid. The company is also preparing to deploy the first commercial-scale demonstration of a small Triton-C system at a Navy test site in Hawaii. The Triton-C has been developed for over a decade and is designed for remote, isolated communities that typically rely on diesel generators, resulting in very high electricity costs.
“There are generations of companies like us that we believe we can reach very competitive cost points with the availability of hardware and software tools,” Nair said. He added that the higher cost of power energy reflects its history and stage of development, not the technology itself. “There is no fundamental reason why this technology must be more expensive than wind energy.”
Robertson believes that the US wave energy sector will begin to expand over the next five years with many small off-the-grid facilities to power marine observation facilities, underwater vehicles, and small remote communities. increase. He believes that the commercialization of large-scale, practical-scale wave energy is about 10 years away. “We know when PacWave will be online,” he said. “I’m bullish on tech and there are really smart people working on them, but we’re all working with incomplete datasets until we put them underwater.”
