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Oregon Races To Catch Up To Europe In Wave Energy

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The foundations for a new heavy marine industry are being laid in Oregon, where the prospect of turning the powerful waves of the Pacific Ocean into electricity is starting to be recognized as a multimillion-dollar, economy-building enterprise.

At a wave-energy conference last week in Portland, signs were evident that Oregon's government, universities and private sector are coalescing around a long-term plan to use the state's punishing ocean swells to create megawatts of power, in the process gaining an advantage over other hopefuls like Hawaii and California and laying the groundwork for a wave-industrial complex that could pose serious competition to Europe, which overwhelmingly dominates the field.

The last two months have seen a flurry of activity:

  • Ocean Power Technologies announced last week that it would deploy its utility-scale wave energy harvester, the PowerBuoy, off the coast of Reedsport. At full size, the Reedsport OPT Wave Park is expected to include 10 buoys that produce 1.5 megawatts, enough to power about 1,000 homes -- by far the largest wave-power installation in the U.S. OPT also plans an installation 10 times larger off Coos Bay, Oregon.
  • In August, the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center deployed the Ocean Sentinel, a floating platform that for the first time allows wave-energy developers to test their devices in the powerful swells of the West Coast.
  • The Department of Energy last week announced a $4 million grant to create the Pacific Marine Energy Center,  which would be a permanent testing station to anchor and test several wave-energy devices at the same time, as well as transmit the power to shore for use on the electrical grid. The center, to be located in either Reedsport or Newport, needs another $4 million in matching funds.

On a tour last Friday, the Oregon Wave Energy Trust took visitors to Oregon State University's wave flume and to the tsunami wave basin, where researchers conducted a test of a small-scale device by Columbia Power Technologies (CPT), a developer based in Corvallis. Then the tour traveled to Newport for a visit to the Ocean Sentinel. Video here:

Despite its status as a "green" technology, the infant wave-energy business will have all the needs of heavy industry: groundbreaking high-tech research, massive testing centers, and factories that can make marine-grade steel devices hundreds of feet long, as well as seagoing expertise in hauling, anchoring and cabling. In a 2009 study, OWET estimated that a mature wave-energy industry could create 13,000 jobs statewide and create economic output of $2.4 billion.

Nonetheless, Oregon and the United States are years behind Europe in the nurturing of a wave-energy industry. As the U.S. has established one small grid-connected test site in Hawaii and struggles to build a second in Oregon, Europe has nine either built or in development on the open ocean, including sites in Ireland, Portugal, France, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, and England. The most advanced, the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Scotland, has berths to test five devices simultaneously and feed their electricity to the grid.

Ocean-energy developers are so eager for these berths that EMEC is already booked five years out -- just the kind of opportunity that the Oregon wave promoters want to capitalize on, especially since so many entrepreneurs are keen to perform tests in Oregon's excellent "wave climate." In other words, Oregon has terrifically powerful waves, and lots of coastline on which to use them.

Here's a video of Oregon State University's Tsunami Wave Basin, conducting a test on a scale model of Columbia Power Technologies' wave-energy converter. The device is 1/33 scale and the waves it is riding are the equivalent of 16-foot swells, which are not uncommon on the Oregon coast.

The U.S. coastline's potential for wave power dwarfs that of Europe. It is estimated that while wave energy in the United Kingdom could collect 40-50 terawatt-hours of usable power per year, the U.S. West Coast has 250 TWh, and the U.S. overall could capture 1,170 TWh of energy a year [pdf], or roughly a third of America's power needs.

These kind of numbers, combined with America's sophisticated marine industry and economic might, has some European wave-energy specialists looking over their shoulders.

"If there was a proper incentive, the U.S. would become a dominant player quite quickly," said Gareth Davies, managing director of the Stromness Business Center, which is affiliated with EMEC at its home in Scotland's Orkney Islands. Davies attended the conference in Oregon last week.

By "proper incentive" Davies meant government subsidies, which Scotland is lavishing on wave energy in order to establish a first-mover advantage. Mindful of its stated goal of getting 100 percent of its power from renewables by 2020, Scotland gives generous feed-in tariffs to wave energy and has offered the Saltire Prize, an award of 10 million pounds (more than $16 million) to the first developer that can produce 100 gigawatt-hours of wave power or more in two years.

Several wave-energy developers are centered in Oregon, including M3 Wave, Floating Power, and CPT. Perhaps even more importantly for the economy, local companies are starting to see contracts, including manufacturers Oregon Iron Works and Vigor Industrial, and ocean hauler Sause Brothers, according to OWET spokeswoman Cate Millar.

Davies of EMEC said that from where he sits in the Scotland's relatively undeveloped Orkney Islands, he envies the industrial and wave potential of Oregon.

"We don't have the kind of infrastructure you have here in Newport," Davies said. 'It's really saying to people here, 'appreciate what you've got, because it doesn't exist anywhere else.'"