NEWPORT, Ore. —
On a boat bobbing up and down in the waves off Newport, Burke Hales gave instructions to the ship captain.
“So a little bit in and a tiny bit south,” Hales said, peering at the sonar screen. “We should be right on top of where the cable comes through the sea floor.”
Hales is a professor at Oregon State University and chief scientist for PacWave, the world’s newest testing site for wave energy devices.
As the world seeks to transition away from fossil fuels, the primary driver of human-caused climate change, one source of energy has remained largely untapped: ocean waves.
The folks behind PacWave — the first utility-scale, grid-connected wave energy test site in the United States — are hoping to change that.
They began the process of securing permits in 2012 and started construction several years ago. Last week marked a milestone for the project.
“Wednesday night, they put the last cable on the sea floor at the test site,” Hales said. “It has taken so long, there have been so many starts and stops, so many challenges, cost implications, working with the contractors to get this all in place. It's been a huge, huge effort to get this going. We're very, very relieved.”
How the cables were laid
Laying cables to and from the testing site might not sound that complicated, but Hales said working in the ocean is always a challenging task.
It started with crews on shore using horizontal drill rigs — which Hales described as “like drilling a well, but sideways" — to drill holes up to 150 feet beneath Driftwood Beach, south of Newport.
The crew of a specialized cable-laying vessel called the HOS Innovator worked for weeks to painstakingly lay more than 70 miles of cable in precise locations to and from the testing site, which was then anchored in large underground vaults at Driftwood Beach.
“Working in these conditions, laying cables, drilling under the sea floor with the precision that these operators can work in is just amazing,” he said.
Finally, another vessel used a remotely-operated vehicle, or ROV, to follow the path of the cable to bury it.
“The burial ROV is like an underwater tractor that lands on the sea floor and jets water into the sea floor and forms a trench for the cable to be buried in,” Hales said.
Despite some disturbance to the sea floor as the cable is being buried, the cable should have little permanent effect on the undersea ecosystem.
Where the cables come ashore
The cables are anchored in large, underground vaults beneath a parking lot at Driftwood Beach. Each of the cables, which were manufactured in Norway, can transport quite a bit of power.
“These three copper elements, that’s what the electrical power flows through. Those are rated to 37,000 volts,” said Hales, showing off a cross-section of one of the cables and noting that they contain fiber optics as well to ferry data back and forth to the testing site.
“We’ve got bandwidth for data rates out to the site that are gigabit,” he said. “We’ve got crazy high levels of data transmission rates here.”
More cables take all that power and data to another site just up the hill from the beach known as the Utility Connection Monitoring Facility. The facility has a building dedicated to monitoring the wave energy devices and analyzing the data, another to plug the power into the local utility grid, and a third where wave energy developers can stage their devices and tie into the cable system.
How wave energy works
Even though it’s almost complete, the testing site doesn’t have any devices set to make energy from waves in the near future.
Oregon State’s role in the test site is to build the facility so that private developers can test their own wave energy devices, which likely won’t be until next year.
“What we provided the developers of the wave energy generation devices is the cable connection, which ultimately goes to the local utility power grid; the connectors that they can mate their devices to and the permits to operate in the site,” Hales said.
Likening the test site to a sports stadium, he said “we're not the competitors, but we build the arena.”
The testing site, which cost roughly $100 million to develop, was a joint effort between the university and the U.S. Department of Energy. Many of the developers looking to use the site also received funding from the federal government.
And the devices they hope to test vary almost as much as the waves that roll up on Oregon beaches. Some look like giant bobbers that float in the ocean. Others look like massive boxes that undulate with the waves. Some are small, others are as large as a building.
Almost all of them use the same basic way of producing energy: using the motion of waves to move a magnet near a wire to create electricity.
The testing site will allow developers to see what works and what doesn’t as they work to bring their devices to real-world applications.
“What we provided is the facility that will allow them to do their tests, simulating what they might ultimately do as a commercially viable entity,” Hales said.
One of the biggest questions is how well the devices will do in the rough waters off Oregon’s coast. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
“How do you keep a device out here and not have it be damaged by the energy you're trying to harvest?” Hales said. “How do you have it survive two years in sea? How do you keep its performance going when sea life is growing on it? How do you keep it so that it doesn't harm sea life in its interactions?”
When will wave energy be in homes?
The electricity from the PacWave test site will be fed into the grid of the Central Lincoln People’s Utility District. Each of the four cables running from the site is rated for up to five megawatts of electricity, Hales said.
If all fourth berths are in use, and all the devices are operating at peak capacity, the site will produce enough energy to power some 2,000 homes.
Seeing wave energy widely available in homes is likely quite a ways off, though. Hales said he believes wave energy is roughly 20 years behind terrestrial wind energy, so it’s realistic to think wave energy could be deployed commercially as soon as a decade from now.
But it will be even longer than that before it makes sense in the Pacific Northwest. Power in the region is among the cheapest in the nation, largely because of renewables already in use, like hydropower. Wave energy is still tremendously expensive as the technology behind it continues to evolve.
Hales said the most likely places where it would become viable the soonest are remote communities, like Kodiak, Alaska, that currently rely on shipments of diesel fuel for power generation.
The PacWave testing site was never intended to generate power for all of Oregon, or even a large fraction of it, though. It was intended to demonstrate the capabilities of those looking to harness the power of the ocean and convert it into energy, helping society wean itself off fossil fuels.
And the completion of the test site means we’re one step closer to doing just that.
“It's huge, right?” said Hales. "I'm a little emotional. We worked so hard on this. It's amazing.”