Why Hasn’t Wave Energy Gotten Its Sea Legs Yet?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, I’m Flora Lichtman, and you’re listening to Science Friday.

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Today on the show, the quest to generate electricity from the ocean.

JES BURNS: Waves have a huge amount of energy in them, but they move slow.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Solar, wind, geothermal. We’ve figured out how to harness energy from many natural Earth systems. But what about waves? You’d think that converting wave power to electricity on a mass scale might have been figured out by now, but the tech is actually just getting its sea legs. So why has this been so hard to develop? And just how promising is it?

We’re starting off first with a look at one of the biggest wave energy projects in the world, with the help of Jes Burns, science and environment reporter at OPB, and host of All Science, No Fiction, based in Portland, Oregon. Jes, welcome back to Science Friday.

JES BURNS: Oh, thank you for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So you’ve reported on this wave energy testing site. It’s off the Coast of Oregon. Help me picture it, first of all.

JES BURNS: Well, it’s kind of hard to picture because it’s pretty invisible out in the ocean. So basically, picture in your mind a giant rectangle that’s 1 by 2 miles big, roughly. That rectangle is then divided into four equal parts, and each one of those parts is considered a berth for wave energy testing. And so four different companies can come in and deploy their buoys there.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Oh, so it’s like they’re floating.

JES BURNS: Yeah, they’re floating but tethered to the bottom. How about that? Now, what you don’t see is that along the bottom, there is infrastructure that’s basically a place where these wave energy devices can hook into these cables that can transport the electricity they produce and all the data about how the different buoys are performing along a cable back to shore, where the developers can kind of look at the performance, assess what’s happening, how things are holding up, and then also feed that electricity onto the grid.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So the waves are bumping into this tech, and that is getting converted, through these different devices that are being tested, into power that’s then going back through this cable.

JES BURNS: Right. And that is the big challenge of wave energy production, is that waves have a huge amount of energy in them, but they move slow. And it’s really hard to produce the electricity. And so one of the challenges that these wave energy developers are doing– and they’re approaching it in all different kinds of ways– is figuring out the best way to most efficiently capture the most amount of electricity from these slow moving waves off the Oregon Coast, and send them back to shore.

And so that’s one of the reasons why this technology is in its infancy.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And is this why we need a testing facility like this?

JES BURNS: Oh, yeah.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Because we haven’t figured out that translation yet.

JES BURNS: Right, right. And think about wind energy. If I say “wind turbine,” you have a picture in your mind. So what’s that picture?

FLORA LICHTMAN: It’s the three blades on the big stalk. I can picture it clearly. Yeah.

JES BURNS: So we’ve had hundreds of years of technological development that have refined that and refined that, that we now the most efficient way to capture energy from the wind is this model, the classic windmill that you see all over the country. There’s not going to be much variation. Well, with wave energy, there just hasn’t been the opportunity to test. And realistically, testing out in the ocean is far more difficult than testing on land, because you have the ocean, which is so unpredictable.

And how do you get out there? If the weather’s bad, you can’t get out there. Notoriously tough, always moving.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Corrosive.

JES BURNS: Corrosive. You have the salt issue. You have biofouling, that issue that you don’t have to deal with on land.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Biofouling? Like animals living?

JES BURNS: Yes, you put something in the ocean, and within days, you start getting larva of stuff attaching to it and growing mussels, and things like that. You just can’t get around that. And so all of these challenges have to be solved for. And the idea of having a dedicated place that these developers can come in and basically plug and play without having to go through all the permitting process that it takes to get approved to do this kind of testing out in the ocean is just invaluable.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Who paid for this facility?

JES BURNS: Mostly federal funding. Yes, it’s a $80 million facility, and they have been building it for 12 to 15 years or so, or they have been in the stages of planning it for about that long.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Have the cuts to federal funding for clean energy and the de-incentivizing of renewable energies affected this facility?

JES BURNS: Well, Dan Helene, who is the director of PacWave right now, he has said that wave energy hasn’t been targeted in the same way that wind and solar has. But in my reporting, I did see that companies were really facing challenges because of cuts to federal funding. I featured in a story that I did an outfit called Aqua Harmonics. They were working on a federal grant. They had received half the money.

The administration changed over, and the rest of the money just never came through. And this was money they were already awarded and guaranteed, and basically, they had already planned for. And that went away. And this company is a very small company, and they basically shut down at the end of June when their grant was up.

Other companies have still moved forward. PacWave says that there are three people signed up right now to test with them, and two of them are expected to be in the ocean, basically, by next fall.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do you need certain ocean characteristics for wave energy?

JES BURNS: You do. You want big waves. You want consistency and big waves. And Oregon really has this in droves. It’s the luck of geography, the luck of wind, the luck of currents. All of these conditions come together to produce one of the areas of the world with the highest wave energy potential. And also, Oregon has the coastal infrastructure that is needed, basically, for the development of this.

So basically, we have power lines and distribution centers along the coast and enough density of communities that that infrastructure is there that PacWave is able to hook back into.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, what is that potential? How much power do people think this facility could realistically bring to Oregon?

JES BURNS: Well, this one is rated for 20 megawatts. And I did the conversion right before I got on with you. It’s enough power to power between 10,000 and 20,000 homes. So in the grand scheme of energy production, kind of small potatoes. And that would be at maximum capacity.

Now, realistically, the amount of power produced will be far lower than that. But this grid connectedness is really what separates PacWave from all of the other wave energy test facilities out there. It’s larger than the other facilities in the United States. There’s one off of Hawaii. There’s one under construction in Southern California, a smaller one, and there’s also a small facility or area at least off of North Carolina, I believe, where testing can happen at a very small scale.

But even in Europe, the big boy is on Orkney Island in Scotland. It’s a huge facility for testing ocean energy technology, but they still don’t have the level of grid connectedness that PacWave have. So that’s a huge advantage for American developers.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Beyond PacWave, do people think that their wave energy could have a meaningful dent in power production?

JES BURNS: The idea would be a utility scale function, and I think a lot of the companies are working towards that. There’s a few different options. One, it’s for powering remote sensors out in the ocean, so powering a tsunami detection buoy. The United States has a fleet of these out in the ocean, and they have to go out and switch out batteries constantly.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Basically, like those mini solar panels that you see on the side of the highway.

JES BURNS: Exactly. So you could power something very small right there where the rest of the device is. The other option would be, so you have an island, a remote community in Alaska. Why not put a wave energy, like a small array out there to help produce power for an island? You’re around an island. You have waves, that use case.

And then I’ve also seen some really interesting ideas about not using wave energy to actually produce power for the grid, but instead to directly power things like desalination, which is highly energy intensive.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That makes sense. Clearly, there are big challenges. Does wave energy have advantages over something like solar or wind, because, for instance, the waves never stop coming?

JES BURNS: Well, that’s exactly it. The waves never stop because there’s not always wind in the ocean, but there’s pretty much always swells because somewhere out in the ocean, there was wind. And those waves travel. Solar, the obvious thing is, you’re producing during the day and not during the night. The waves never turn off. There are definitely advantages to wave energy systems, especially when you start thinking about it working in conjunction with these other renewables. They’re really nicely complementary.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Right. PacWave got some good news last month from a giant power transmitter. Can you tell us about that?

JES BURNS: Yeah, so Bonneville Power Administration, which is one of the major players on the West Coast for transmission lines, they have formed an agreement with the local public utility district along the Oregon Coast that’s near PacWave to purchase that 20 megawatts of power as it is produced. That’s big news, because it’s basically a guaranteed way that the facilities and the developers could recoup some of the money that it takes to run the facility.

And it also, basically, is a really great way to show on the ground how this could work. If that power wasn’t able to feed onto those lines, then having grid connectivity doesn’t actually matter. But the fact that you have some place for this power to go, and then see how that power plays in the energy mix is going to be invaluable for PacWave, for sure, but I think also to just the larger development of wave energy in the United States.

Jes Burns is a science and environment reporter at Oregon Public Broadcasting. Jes, thanks for chatting.

JES BURNS: All right. Thank you.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Don’t go away because after the break, why developing this technology is so difficult.

– For wave energy, there’s no half measures. You have to design your machine to survive in the marine environment from day one.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Now to give us a look at what’s happening with wave energy outside the US and what’s on the horizon for this technology is Deborah Greaves, Professor of Ocean Engineering at the University of Plymouth in England. She researches offshore renewable energy. Deborah, welcome to Science Friday.

DEBORAH GREAVES: Hello. Thank you very much for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So we just got a picture of wave energy in the US. Progress is happening, but obviously, a lack of support from the federal government right now. What are countries outside of the US doing in this space?

DEBORAH GREAVES: Well, in the UK, we have research programs investigating wave energy. There are other bodies within the UK, such as Wave Energy Scotland, that support wave energy, and elsewhere in Europe, and elsewhere around the world. So examples of that are– CorPower is a wave energy company that’s come through from Sweden. And they’ve recently secured a European funding and have plans for a large array project.

Another example is M4 Device, which has been developed through Manchester University in the UK. And that’s recently been deployed at sea at the demonstration site in Albany in Australia.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And are these all testing facilities like the one we heard about in Oregon?

DEBORAH GREAVES: They are. Yes, wave energy hasn’t really got to commercial stage in the same way as offshore wind. A lot of new concepts are being investigated in the research stage and in the laboratory.

FLORA LICHTMAN: There’s not much federal appetite for supporting this tech in the US right now. Is there more enthusiasm for developing it abroad?

DEBORAH GREAVES: Well, I think wave energy is challenging because it’s still got a high price point in comparison with other offshore renewables. So there’s a lot of investment going into deep water solutions and floating offshore wind solutions. Wave energy and tidal stream are necessary parts of our future energy mix, but they’re not quite ready in the same way for commercialization yet, or they’re not securing the same amount of funding.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do you think they’re necessary?

DEBORAH GREAVES: Yes. So I think one of the aspects of moving to a renewable energy system is that those renewables coming from natural sources, which are variable. And so in order to have a resilient system, you really need to have a diversity of resources. So if we think of solar, which obviously is operating when the sun is shining, but not when it’s not, wind, which operates variably and it’s not always windy.

But if we combine the two together, we get better resilience and a better coverage of electricity throughout the day and throughout the seasons. But with wave energy and tidal stream, as well, added into the mix, that just gives us much greater resilience. And as a result, if we have that sort of diverse mix of resources, solar, wind, wave, and tidal, then together we have much more resilience.

And some studies have shown that, in fact, you can, by adding wave and tidal energy into the energy system, you can reduce the overall cost of overprovision that would otherwise be needed, and also reduce the overall cost of the amount of storage that you’d need without those additional types of energy generation.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So that’s the pitch to people who say, well, we don’t need this. It’s a piece of the puzzle.

DEBORAH GREAVES: Yeah, it’s an important piece of the puzzle, and it will reduce the overall energy system cost. And it will also provide an important opportunity for a new sector, a new growth market, as well.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, and domestic production of energy, right?

DEBORAH GREAVES: Yes, exactly. Domestic production, energy security, as well as potential export. But yes, when we think about energy security and energy resilience, it’s really important to have those different components of the system.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What do you think people miss about wave energy?

DEBORAH GREAVES: In general, people are often very positive about wave energy. Certainly in the UK, people looking at living on the coast see all of that power in the waves and just think, well, why can’t we access that, all that raw power? Can’t we harness that in some way? But I think it is a real challenge to design engineering solutions to both producing the electricity, but also, to be able to survive the storms when the storms come along.

So we want them to be activated by the waves when we want them to operate. But the wave farm can’t move out of the way when the big storm comes along. So it’s quite a design challenge. For wave energy, there’s no sort of half measures. You can’t really do that onshore. So you have to design your machine to survive in the marine environment from day one.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, and the power of the ocean is also a pitfall.

DEBORAH GREAVES: Exactly.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Deborah Greaves is a Professor of Ocean Engineering at the University of Plymouth in England, and she’s also the Director of the Supergen Offshore Renewable Energy Hub. Deborah, thanks for talking to me today.

DEBORAH GREAVES: Thank you. Thank you very much.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: Today’s episode was produced by Dee Peterschmidt. I’m Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.

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