Can wave-energy be a green-power solution for coastal communities? That question may be at least partially answered in Newport, Oregon, a small seaside town cooperating with the U.S. Department of Energy in an attempt to convert wave power into electricity. Newport expects the project to provide enough energy to power thousands of its homes and businesses.
The process uses buoy-type converters located miles offshore. These converters transfer energy to underwater connectors into which they are plugged. From the connectors, cables buried underneath the seafloor carry the generated electricity to onshore power utilities.
But because waves—unlike, for example, rivers—do not move linearly, capturing their energy is not a simple process; no ideal converter design currently exists. While all converters use the oscillating motion of a wave to generate electrical current, in the same way that turbines use rotations, companies across the world have developed different converter designs, using different processes to harness a wave’s energy. Some use rotating cylinders, and some are actual buoys moving up and down with the waves. Other more snakelike designs have joints that move with the water’s surge.
Many of these devices will be used as part of Newport’s project, which should help determine how much power the various converters can produce, how they hold up in rough ocean conditions, their environmental impact (if any), and any compatibility issues. It is possible that no one converter design will work everywhere, either. Water depth and prevailing ocean conditions may prove one design ideal for Newport, but its suitability for all coastal environments will likely remain an open question.
Unlike solar and wind sources, both of which depend on variable environmental factors such as sunshine, waves provide—if we can access it—constant energy. And because wave-energy projects do not require the sort of horizon-marring superstructure required by offshore wind-energy efforts, they inspire less opposition. Even the largest wave-energy converters will likely prove invisible to the naked eye.
Such considerations may be why the federal government recently announced that it would direct up to $112.5 million, its largest marine-energy investment, toward the development of wave-energy converters. Successfully harnessing this energy would be a monumental step towards greening the United States’s energy grid; coastal waves contain enough energy to power one-third of all the nation’s homes.
But wave energy’s initial appeal is to more-isolated communities dependent on diesel fuel for power. Wave energy’s price point—probably between 12 and 47 cents per kilowatt hour—cannot compete in areas with plentiful access to cheap energy, but could provide real relief to places in, for example, Alaska, that currently lack access to a power grid.
Although wave-energy development is widely considered to be 20 years behind wind-harnessing technology, its usefulness to remote communities could provide a fiscally-sensible path for its experimentation and refinement that proved unavailable during wind energy’s development. If your company operates in the green-energy sector, finding ways to get in on the ground floor of wave-energy’s technological elevator could prove very profitable as the nation continues its search for reliable green power.