The Earth is a mass of wasted potential – energy potential. The wind rushes across turbine-less plains, the sunlight crashes against black asphalt roofing, and the ocean waves crash relentlessly against coastlines around the world. Billions of dollars and decades have spawned industries dedicated to harnessing the first two free renewable energy sources, but harnessing the rhythmic heartbeat of the world's oceans is proving to be a bigger challenge.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the theoretical annual energy potential of waves crashing on the U.S. coast is about 2.64 trillion kilowatt-hours, roughly two-thirds of the U.S.'s total electricity generation in 2021. While it's probably impossible to squeeze every single one of those kilowatt-hours out of the ocean, wave energy could make up about 10% to 20% of the U.S. renewable energy mix.
And grid energy is just one application for these wave energy converters (WECs): Companies such as Oregon-based C-Power are developing devices that, according to the company's CEO, Reenst Lesemann, “take a power strip and an Ethernet cable and put it out to sea.”
“The ocean is our biggest, best, and most flexible battery,” Lessemann said. “If we don't harness that battery, we'll have a power desert.”
C-Power is one of many companies looking to revolutionize how the world explores and generates electricity from its oceans, and hopes to test its machines, the SeaRAY and the operational version of the StingRAY, on PacWave. Supported by government, state and federal grants, PacWave will be the first wave energy test facility on U.S. soil and one of only a few such facilities in the world. Based in Newport, Oregon, PacWave will play a central role in determining what works and what doesn't, aiming to unleash a long-awaited affordable ocean energy revolution for the industry.
Image courtesy of C-Power
The SeaRAY was installed at a wave energy test site in Kaneohe Bay on the island of Oahu, Hawaii.
Currently, expensive ships can only provide a few kilowatts of power, limiting research time to explore some of the most fragile ecosystems on Earth. Wave energy could provide endless electrons for deep-sea exploration, provide offshore power to remote coastal communities, power always-on sensors designed to survey deep-sea habitats, and enhance the thousands of wind turbines already anchored offshore, creating a vital renewable energy safety net when the sun doesn't shine or the wind blows.
So why is wave energy lagging behind while solar and wind energy regularly break records? The thing is, it's not easy to build machines underwater.
The first attempts to harness wave power only came about in the 1970s, when Britain began investing in alternative energy methods after the 1973 oil crisis (the same year an oil embargo was imposed on the US during the Arab-Israeli war). The pioneer of this research was Stephen Salter, a professor of engineering at the University of Edinburgh, who designed a dynamically shaped float he called the “duck” (so named because the device bobs up and down in the water like an energy-harvesting water bird).
An early wave energy scheme, known as “Salter's Duck”, never delivered on its renewable energy promises, despite seven years of funding, due to government apathy and the arrival of abundant, cheap oil in the 1980s.
Despite the unfulfilled promises, Salter and his floating “duck” planted the seeds of a possible future for wave energy.
“In my view, Salter's Duck pioneered the field of modern wave energy converters,” said Dr. Michael Lawson, Marine Energy Group Manager for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's (NREL) Hydropower Research and Development Program. “Until the early 2000s, investment in research and development of this technology was slow and minimal, but the early 2000s saw significant investment in tidal and wave energy technologies in Europe.”
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A surge in alternative energy investments spawned a slew of companies designing and, with any luck, deploying wave-powered devices of various shapes and sizes, including WaveBob, Pelamis and Aquamarine. But ultimately, all three suffered the same fate: they filed for bankruptcy, went under or otherwise folded, never making their wave-power dreams a reality.
This is where a certification body like PacWave becomes essential.
“PacWave will be able to characterize their performance, measure power, forces and loads, and find the right way to moor them,” says NREL's Arlinda Huskey, who previously worked on certification testing at the National Wind Technology Center near Boulder, Colo. “There's an awful lot to learn, and we'll have to wait and see if these devices are commercialized.”
PACWAVE actually has two test facilities, one in the north and one in the south. The north one, which is already operational, tests smaller prototypes, but it's in shallow waters and close to the port, so it's not connected to the mainland's power grid. Dan Hellin, deputy director at PacWave, says the south one sees a lot of “underwater steel.”
Once operational in 2025, PacWave South will be capable of hosting 20 wave energy devices. These stations will be further divided into four test berths, each with its own dedicated transmission cable, connecting to onshore utility connections and monitoring facilities. Located at Driftwood Beach State Recreation Site south of Newport, the facilities will allow developers to monitor the wave energy devices in real time. In July 2024, workers began installing cables that will connect these test berths to the mainland power grid.
“We're building a sandbox, and anyone can bring their toys and test them in the sandbox,” says Dr. Burke Hales, a professor at Oregon State University and PacWave's lead scientist. “An opaque, unproven megawatt is less valuable than 500 proven kilowatts, so we do monitoring and verify the power state.”
Of course, this sandbox is not a sterile testing environment, but rather a dynamic and diverse natural ecosystem. Building a test facility along the Oregon coast and placing experimental equipment in its waters would pose environmental hazards. Ocean noise could affect marine mammal migration, and hardware could entangle wildlife (especially if crab pots were moved to the test site), and artificial reef structures could create habitat for cod and octopus that prey on flatfish such as flounder, species that were previously safe from such predators in the region.
“Part of the problem is that there are very few wave energy devices in the world and very little research done on them.”
“So we have a mandate to monitor the undersea ecosystem,” Hales says. “We're out there looking at things like, 'Have all the crabs gone? Has dropping anchor changed what's living on the bottom?' Those are all part of our mandate to monitor. We also have plans in place to mitigate the impacts to the bats.”
But because PacWave is a first-time technology proving ground, the project comes with some unknowns, both in terms of which WECs will generate the most watts and how the machines will affect the surrounding ecosystem.
“One of the problems is that there are very few wave energy devices in the world, and therefore very little research on them,” Helin says. “One of the goals of PacWave is to monitor the deployment of wave energy devices and answer some of these questions. You can't answer them if there's nothing in the water.”
When PACWAVE SOUTH begins operating in 2025, its experimental kilowatts won't be confined to the lab. The project will connect directly to the local electric grid operated by the Central Lincoln People's Utility District (PUD) to provide electricity to Newport residents, allowing developers to see how competitive wave energy is against other energy sources. At full capacity, PacWave will power 2,000 homes from electrons generated by ocean waves. That's a small amount of power, but it counts.
While it's easy to imagine swarms of these devices bobbing in the ocean on the distant horizon, like the growing number of wind farms off the coasts of Europe, this isn't WEC's most likely use in the near future. Warmer regions and low-energy coasts, especially along the east coast, are unlikely to benefit from such devices compared to the rougher seas in cooler environments out west. But even in those rough seas, WECs could get a start in a relatively niche application.
Image courtesy of PacWave
An illustration of the PacWave South facility near Newport, Oregon.
“This has a variety of uses,” Huskey says, “One is to send power back to the mainland. It can also be deployed for emergencies such as hurricanes. ROVs deployed offshore may just need a charge.”
“My intuition is that we'll see at least some different concepts because the end uses are very different,” Lawson said, noting that remote ocean observation technologies and remote communities could benefit most. “Utility-scale (wave) farms could be combined with floating offshore wind farms. These technologies would need to be integrated with that wind farm… sharing mooring and anchoring systems with the wind turbines.”
And all these different WEC combinations – powering research vessels, undersea sensor arrays, or entire onshore communities – will be tested in the real world for the first time on PacWave.While other renewable sources continue their own energy revolution, the adoption of wave energy has the potential to be another powerful resource that harnesses one of the most energy-rich natural processes on Earth.
“We're hoping that PacWave will be the catalyst to pick up the pace of things,” Herrin says. “Ultimately, you have to be able to test it in the real world at full scale before you can move on to the next step, right?”
Darren lives in Portland, owns cats, and writes/edits about science fiction and how our world works. If you look hard enough, you can find his previous writing on Gizmodo and Paste.
