Firm goes with flow in search for energy from oceans’ waves
Posted on Monday, October 6, 2008
PHILADELPHIA — Five miles off the southern tip of New Jersey’s Long Beach Island, an oversized yellow buoy floats alone, purposefully mounting the waves and occasionally phoning home.
After two years it has proven itself, at least to its inventors, as a workable design for what may well be the biggest technological quest of the 21 st century: renewable energy.
With every significant bob of the buoy, pistons slide up and down inside a cylinder, generating electricity.
Not much, really. New Jersey waves are small and variable compared with the powerhouses that approach the West Coast.
But the test buoy makes enough power to run its onboard computer and other systems, and to send periodic progress reports to its manufacturer, Ocean Power Technologies of Pennington, N. J.
Company co-founder George W. Taylor, 74, is an engineer who learned the power of waves as a young surfer growing up in Australia. He considers his Jersey buoy a showcase of the potential for wave “farms” — clusters of buoys moored off the more vigorous coasts of the world, pumping electricity ashore via underwater cables.
Indeed, ocean energy is “probably the last of the large natural resources not yet investigated for producing electricity in the United States,” according to a report from the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute.
While the technology is still in its infancy, the report surmises that ocean energy could be among the most environmentally benign generation methods yet developed.
The vast bulk of the world’s energy, of course, is produced using coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear or hydroelectric power, each of which poses serious environmental risks.
The least harmful sources are solar, wind, geothermal and what can be called “hydrokinetic” — electricity generated from waves or directly from the flow of water in ocean currents, tides or inland waterways.
Roger Bedard, the institute’s ocean-energy expert, said the potential for getting power from waves and tides is “significant.” It could generate the equivalent of 10 percent of the nation’s current power needs, said Bedard, who maintains that this is no pie-in-the-sky figure but one that already accounts for inefficiencies and practicalities.
Europe is far ahead of the United States in this field, although proposals in the U. S. have been mounting.
In 2005 and 2006 combined, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued just four preliminary permits for hydrokinetic projects. That number rose to 33 in 2007, and 77 so far this year.
The three-year permits are intended to allow companies to do needed studies and planning. But so many companies have used them to, in effect, reserve vast regions of ocean for themselves that the agency insisted on more project specifics and began to scrutinize them more strictly, spokesman Celeste Miller said.
Most of the permits have been for projects harnessing river flows — chiefly along the Mississippi River and several Alaskan waterways. On the East Coast, one company has been experimenting with turbines off Manhattan.
But Bedard and others say ocean waves hold the most promise. One reason is that they can generate electricity where it’s needed most. About half the world population lives within 50 miles of coastline.
Waves also are more dense than wind — compare sticking your arm out the window of a speeding car to putting it into the water beside a speedboat — so they can generate electricity more efficiently. And unlike offshore windmills, wave buoys have a low profile, hardly visible from shore.
Designs under development — with vivid names such as Wave Dragon, Anaconda and Oceanlinx — range from undulating, snakelike contraptions to massive, in-water ramps that waves climb before falling into a reservoir, generating power in the process.
Ocean Power Technologies ’ PowerBuoy requires waves at least 4 feet high. Taylor said the design has proven its mettle up to wave heights of about 22 feet. Above that, the buoy automatically shuts down and rides out the storm.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s only commercial license for any hydrokinetic project so far has gone to a Canadian company whose plans to install buoys off Washington state have stalled.
Bedard said Ocean Power Technologies is leading the field, and he expects it will build the nation’s first commercial-scale project.
That would be just off the small Oregon town of Reedsport. There, as all along the coast, waves whipped up by the prevailing west-to-east winds — and not slowed by a shallow continental shelf close to shore — arrive after crossing the Pacific with roughly triple the wave energy of the East Coast, Bedard said.
The Ocean Power Technologies buoy is designed to work in about 150 feet of water, where waves retain about 90 percent of their energy. By depths of 50 feet, Taylor said, the sea bed has absorbed most of it.
The company hopes to moor 10 buoys off Reedsport, each capable of generating power equivalent to the amount used by 150 homes.
If f inal approval comes through, the first buoy would go into the water next year, Taylor said.
Reedsport Mayor Keith Tymchuk is a supporter.
“The time has come for us to test this method of generating what seems to be very green electricity,” he said.
Many say the project will provide jobs. But opposition has come from fishermen and watermen who harvest the region’s famed Dungeness crabs and fear competition for the ocean.
Other concerns about wave power include disturbance of the seabed, altered erosion patterns onshore, fish or birds being struck by moving parts, and whales getting tangled in submerged cables.
Still, “you don’t have to put in the whole Hoover Dam all at once,” Bedard said.
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