How to turn ocean waves into renewable energy

(LOS ANGELES) — The power of the ocean could soon be used to power homes in the U.S. as scientists prepare to test an untapped form of renewable energy.

The U.S. Department of Energy has invested $112.5 million to advance the commercial readiness of wave energy technologies by harnessing the powerful waves of the Pacific Northwest.

The first-ever facility, equipped with open water testing is set to begin operations off a seaside Oregon town next summer, Burke Hales, a professor of oceanography at Oregon State University who has involved in the launch, told ABC News.

Named Pacwave, PacWave the facility was built with the infrastructure to house four separate test berths, each with its own dedicated cable that leads from about 7 miles offshore back to the coastal facility, Matthew Grosso, director of the Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office, told ABC News.

It’s a project that was more than a decade, requiring years of permit approvals with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and input from all of the federal ocean agencies, including the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the National Fisheries Service and the Marine Mammal Commission, Hales said.

The five-year investment from the federal government will involve testing by companies to accelerate the design, fabrication and testing of wave energy converters (WECs), which will harness power from ocean waves, which will then be converted at PacWave into energy that will supply the power grid.

Ocean wave energy could soon become synonymous with other natural sources of power like wind, solar and geothermal. In the U.S., there’s enough marine energy resources, including waves, tides, rivers and ocean currents to power over half of the country’s energy demands, Grosso said.

The renewable could prove to be even be more abundant, unlike solar, which ends when the sun sets, and wind, which isn’t always available, Hales said. The biggest challenge marine energy presents is how new it is compared to the other renewables, which have extensive existing infrastructure, Grosso said.

“Wave is this great complement to the other renewables, because it’s sort of slow and steady, he said. “There are basically always waves on the ocean.”

How is it possible to collect energy from ocean waves?

Using water to create energy is nothing new, the experts said. Traditional water mills were found in China as early as 30 A.D., and humans have been extracting power from the flow of water ever since.

But while water mills rely on the movement of the tide, PacWave will be focusing on surface waves in the open ocean, Hales said.

Devices bobbing up and down on the ocean surface like a buoy harness the natural movement of the water and send the captured energy back to shore via underwater pipes, Grosso said. The devices are located about 7 miles offshore.

One of the challenges is the waves can arrive erratically, so building devices that can withstand a challenging environment is key, Maha Haji, an assistant professor of mechanical, aerospace and systems engineering at Cornell University, told ABC News.

From its shoreside facility, PacWave then takes the power that comes from the wave generation devices and makes it compatible to enter the Central Lincoln Public Utility District, Grosso said.

The PacWave facility is currently in its commissioning phase, Hales said.

“We have to run the system through a number of tests to make certain that we don’t have a short circuit out there miles into the ocean that we have to go fix,” he said.

These US locations are best suited for harnessing ocean energy

While the U.S. is surrounded by coastlines, there are only a few regions where the generation of ocean wave power is viable.

Places with the biggest waves — Hawaii, Alaska and the Pacific coast — are the best locations to utilize wave energy converters due to the strength and consistency of the waves, the experts said.

However, wave energy can also be combined with other renewables, so there are benefits to combining wind, wave and solar together — making Texas another viable option, due to its existing renewable infrastructure, despite the Gulf of Mexico being in calmer waters, Haji said.

When it came time to selecting the best location to put the test facility, Northern California and central Oregon were deemed best suited, Hales said.

Southeast Alaska also has energetic waves, but the coastline is challenging, and the region is not equipped with the necessary infrastructure to connect the collected energy to the local grid.

Input from local communities played a big role in planning

PacWave will be operating out of two different sites — each located near Newport, Oregon, a deepwater port. The inception of the project was devised “hand-in-hand” with the local community, Grosso said.

The exact locations of the sites were picked by local fishers, who made the determination based on the location of the tow lanes that access the port, depth conditions, strength of the waves and whether the local community would be supportive, Hales said.

That level of consideration for the local ecology and economy continues to impact the PacWave project, the energy experts said.

Application documents included fine details on the regional ecosystem, including what kind of shrimp burrow in the nearby sand, fish that are attracted to the region and the marine mammals that could possibly be impacted by the presence of the devices, Hales said. The permits contain a requirement for acoustic monitoring to make certain the devices aren’t changing the underwater noise distributions and ways that impact marine mammals.

This was all done to minimize the impacts on the environment, Hales said, adding that community members have been concerned about the potential hazard to wildlife and the presence of offshore wind infrastructure.

“It was an exhaustive effort to identify where the problem might be, avoid those problems, and, if they’re unavoidable, talk about mitigating them,”

Engaging the community has resulted in “very little footprint” in the construction of the sites, Grosso said.

“It’s hard to tell that there’s anything there,” he said.