Why Hasn’t Wave Energy Gotten Its Sea Legs Yet?

It’s hard to convert energy from the ocean into electricity, thanks to a tough regulatory environment and, well, the ocean.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Flora Lichtman?

  Hey, I'm Flora Lichtman, and you're listening to Science Friday.

• 0:07Flora Lichtman?

  Today on the show, the quest to generate electricity from the ocean.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Waves have a huge amount of energy in them, but they move slow.

• 0:22Flora Lichtman?

  Solar, wind, geothermal, we've figured out how to harness energy from many natural earth systems. But what about waves? You'd think that converting wave power to electricity on a mass scale might have been figured out by now, but the tech is actually just getting its sea legs. So why has this been so hard to develop? And just how promising is it? We're starting off first with a look at one of the biggest wave energy projects in the world with the help of Jess Burns, science and environment reporter at OPB and host of All Science, No Fiction, based in Portland, Oregon. Jess, welcome back to Science Friday.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you for having me.

• 1:00Flora Lichtman?

  So you've reported on this wave energy testing site. It's off the coast of Oregon. Help me picture it, first of all.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Well, it's kind of hard to picture because it's pretty invisible out in the ocean, right? So basically, if, okay, picture in your mind, a giant rectangle that's like one by two miles big, roughly. That rectangle is then divided into four equal parts. And each one of those parts is considered a birth for wave energy testing. And so four different companies can come in and deploy their buoys there.

• 1:41Flora Lichtman?

  Oh, so it's, they're floating?

• 1:42Speaker 01

  They're floating, yeah. They're floating, but tethered to the bottom. How about that? Now, what you don't see is that along the bottom, there is infrastructure that's basically a place where these wave energy devices can hook into these cables that can transport the electricity they produce and all the data about how the different buoys are performing along a cable back to shore, where the developers can kind of look at the performance, assess what's happening, how things are holding up, and then also feed that electricity onto the grid.

• 2:23Flora Lichtman?

  So the waves are bumping into this tech and that is getting converted through these different devices that are being tested into power that's then going back through this cable.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Right, and you know, that is the big challenge of wave energy production is that waves have a huge amount of energy in them, but they move slow, right? And it's really hard to produce the electricity. And so one of the challenges that these wave energy developers are doing, and they're approaching it in all different kinds of ways, is figuring out the best way to most efficiently capture the most amount of electricity from these slow-moving waves off the Oregon coast and send them back to shore. And so that's one of the reasons why this technology is in its infancy.

• 3:17Flora Lichtman?

  And is this why we need a testing facility like this?

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:21Flora Lichtman?

  Because we haven't figured out that translation yet?

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Right, right. And, you know, think about wind energy, right? If I say a wind turbine, you have a picture in your mind. So what's that picture?

• 3:34Flora Lichtman?

  It's the three blades.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:36Flora Lichtman?

  On the big stalk. I can picture it clearly, yes.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  So we've had hundreds of years of technological development that have refined that and refined that, that we now know the most efficient way to capture energy from the wind is this model, the classic windmill that you see all over the country. There's not going to be much variation. Well, with wave energy, there just hasn't been the opportunity to test. And realistically, testing out in the ocean is far more difficult than testing on land because you have The ocean, which is so unpredictable, right? And how do you get out there? If the weather's bad, you can't get out there.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Notoriously tough, always moving.

• 4:24Flora Lichtman?

  Corrosive.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Corrosive, right? You have the salt issue. You have biofowling, that issue that you don't have to deal with on land. And so.

• 4:34Flora Lichtman?

  Biofowling, like animals living on it?

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Yes, like you put something in the ocean and within days, you start getting larva of stuff attaching to it and like growing mussels and things like that, right? You just can't get around that. And so all of these challenges have to be solved for. And the idea of having a dedicated place that these developers can come in and basically plug and play without having to go through all like the permitting process that it takes to get approved to do this kind of testing out in the ocean is just invaluable.

• 5:11Flora Lichtman?

  Who paid for this facility?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Mostly federal funding, yes. It's an $80 million facility and they have been building it for 12 to 15 years or so, or they have been in the stages of planning it for about that long.

• 5:28Flora Lichtman?

  Have the cuts to federal funding for clean energy and the sort of de-incentivizing of renewable energies affected this facility?

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Well, Dan Helene, who is the director of PacWave right now, he has said that wave energy hasn't been targeted in the same way that wind and solar has. But in my reporting, I did see that companies were really facing challenges because of cuts to federal funding. I featured in a story that I did, an outfit called Aqua Harmonix. They were working on a federal grant. They had received half the money. The administration changed over and the rest of the money just never came through. And this was money they were already awarded and guaranteed and basically they

• 6:20Speaker 01

  had already planned for and that went away. And this company, it's a very small company, and they basically shut down at the end of June when their grant was up. Other companies have still moved forward. Pakwave says that there are three people signed up right now to test with them and two of them are expected to be in the ocean basically by next fall.

• 6:43Flora Lichtman?

  Do you need certain ocean characteristics for wave energy?

• 6:47Speaker 01

  You do. You want big waves. You want consistency in big waves. And Oregon really has this in droves. It's kind of, you know, the luck of geography, the luck of wind, the luck of currents, like all of these conditions come together to produce one of the areas of the world with the highest wave energy potential. And also, Oregon has the coastal infrastructure that is needed, basically, for the development of this. So basically, we have power lines and distribution centers along the coast and enough, like, density

• 7:27Speaker 01

  of communities that that infrastructure is there that Pakwave is able to hook back into.

• 7:33Flora Lichtman?

  Well, what is that potential? I mean, how much power do people think this facility could realistically bring to Oregon?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Well, this one is rated for 20 megawatts. And I did the conversion right before I got on with you. It's enough power to power between 10,000 and 20,000 homes. So, in the grand scheme of energy production, kind of small potatoes. And that would be at maximum capacity. Now, realistically, the amount of power produced will be far lower than that, but this grid connectedness is really what separates Pakwave from all of the other wave energy test facilities out there. It's larger than the other facilities in the United

• 8:22Speaker 01

  States. There's one off of Hawaii. There's one under construction in Southern California, a smaller one. And there's also a small facility or area, at least off of North Carolina, I believe, that where testing can happen at a very small scale. But even in Europe, like the big boy is on Orkney Island in Scotland. Like, it's a huge facility for testing ocean energy technology. But they still don't have the level of grid connectedness that Pakwave have. So that's a huge advantage for American developers.

• 8:57Flora Lichtman?

  I mean, beyond Pakwave, do people think that their wave energy could have a meaningful dent in power production?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  I mean, the ideal would be a utility scale function. And I think a lot of the companies are working towards that. There's a few different options. One, it's for like powering remote sensors out in the ocean. So powering a tsunami detection buoy, right? The United States has a fleet of these out in the ocean. And they have to go out and switch out batteries, right, constantly?

• 9:31Flora Lichtman?

  Like a solar, basically like those mini solar panels that you see on the side of the highway.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Exactly. So you could, you could power something very small right there where the rest of the device is. The other option would be, so you have an island, a remote community in Alaska. Why not put a wave energy, like a small array out there to help produce power for an island? You're around an island, you have waves, like that kind of use case. And then I've also seen some really interesting ideas about not using wave energy to actually produce power for the grid, but instead to directly power things like desalination, which is highly energy intensive.

• 10:19Flora Lichtman?

  That makes sense. I mean, you know, clearly there are big challenges. Does wave energy have advantages over something like solar or wind? Because, you know, for instance, the waves never stop coming.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Well, that's exactly it. The waves never stop because there's not always wind in the ocean. But there's pretty much always swells because somewhere out in the ocean, there was wind, right? And those waves travel. I mean, solar, the obvious thing is you're producing during the day and not during the night. The waves never turn off. There are definitely advantages to wave energy systems as, you know, especially when you start thinking about it, working in conjunction with these other renewables, they're really kind of, they're really nicely complementary.

• 11:06Flora Lichtman?

  Right. Pakwave got some good news last month from a giant power transmitter. Can you tell us about that?

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Bonneville Power Administration, which is one of the major players on the West Coast for transmission lines. They have formed an agreement with the local public utility district along the Oregon coast that's near Pakwave to purchase that 20 megawatts of power as it is produced. That's big news because it's basically a guaranteed way that the facilities and the developers could recoup some of the money that it takes to run the facility. And it also basically is a really great way to show on the ground how this could work.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  If that power wasn't able to feed onto those lines, then having grid connectivity doesn't actually matter. But the fact that you have some place for this power to go and then see how that power plays in the energy mix is going to be invaluable for Pakwave, for sure. But I think also to just the larger development of wave energy in the United States.

• 12:21Flora Lichtman?

  Jess Burns is a science and environment reporter at Oregon Public Broadcasting. Jess, thanks for chatting.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  All right, thank you.

• 12:32Flora Lichtman?

  Don't go away because after the break, why developing this technology is so difficult?

• 12:38Speaker 02

  For wave energy, there's no sort of half-measures. You have to design your machine to survive in the marine environment from day one.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  Support for Science Friday comes from Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation.

• 13:03Flora Lichtman?

  Now to give us a look at what's happening with wave energy outside the US and what's on the horizon for this technology is Deborah Greaves, Professor of Ocean Engineering at the University of Plymouth in England. She researches offshore renewable energy. Deborah, welcome to Science Friday.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Hello. Thank you very much for having me.

• 13:21Flora Lichtman?

  So we just got a picture of wave energy in the US. You know, progress is happening, but obviously a lack of support from the federal government right now. What are countries outside of the US doing in this space?

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Okay, well, in the UK, we have research programs investigating wave energy. There are other bodies within the UK such as Wave Energy Scotland that support wave energy and elsewhere in Europe and elsewhere around the world. So examples of that are, Core Power is a wave energy company that's come through from Sweden, and they've recently secured European funding and have plans for a larger A project. Another example is M4 Device, which has been developed through Manchester University in the UK, and that's recently been deployed at sea at the demonstration site in Albany in Australia.

• 14:15Flora Lichtman?

  And are these all testing facilities, like the one we heard about in Oregon?

• 14:20Speaker 02

  They are, yes. Wave Energy hasn't really got to commercial stage in the same way as offshore wind. A lot of new concepts being investigated in the research stage and in the laboratory.

• 14:34Flora Lichtman?

  You know, there's not much federal appetite for supporting this tech in the US right now. Is there more enthusiasm for developing it abroad?

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Well, I think wave energy is challenging because it's still got a high price point in comparison with other offshore renewables. So there's a lot of investment going into deep water solutions and floating offshore wind solutions. Wave energy and tidal stream are necessary parts of our future energy mix, but they are, they're not quite ready in the same way for commercialization yet, or they're not securing the same amount of funding.

• 15:11Flora Lichtman?

  Do you think they're necessary?

• 15:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think one of the aspects of moving to a renewable energy system is that those renewables come from natural sources which are variable. And so in order to have a resilient system, you really need to have a diversity of resources. So if we think of, you know, solar, which obviously is is operating when the sun's shining, but not when it's not, wind, which operates invariably and it's not always windy. But if we combine the two together, we get better resilience and a better coverage of electricity throughout the day and throughout the seasons. But with wave energy and tidal stream as well added into the mix, that just gives us

• 15:59Speaker 02

  much greater resilience. And as a result, if we have that sort of diverse mix of resources, solar, wind, wave and tidal, then together we have much more resilience. And some studies that have shown that in fact you can, by adding wave and tidal energy into the energy system, you can reduce the overall cost of over provision that would otherwise be be needed, and also reduce the overall cost of the amount of storage that you'd need without those additional types of energy generation.

• 16:36Flora Lichtman?

  So that's the pitch to people who say, well, we don't need this. It's a piece of the puzzle.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's an important piece of the puzzle and it will reduce the overall energy system cost. And it will also provide an important opportunity for a new sector, a new growth market as well.

• 16:53Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah, and domestic production of energy, right?

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Domestic production, energy security, as well as potential export. But yes, when we think about energy security and energy resilience, it's really important to have those different components of the system.

• 17:10Flora Lichtman?

  What do you think people miss about wave energy?

• 17:13Speaker 02

  In general, people are often very positive about wave energy. Certainly in the UK, people looking at living on the coast see all of that power in the waves and just think, you know, well, why can't we access that, all that, all that raw power? Can't we harness that in some way? But I think it is a real challenge to design engineering solutions to both producing the electricity, but also to be able to survive the storms when storms come along. So we want them to be activated by the waves when we want them to operate. But a wave farm can't sort of move out of the way when the big storm comes along. So it's quite a, it's quite a design challenge.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  For wave energy, there's no sort of half measures. You can't really do that onshore. So you, you have to design your machine to survive in the marine environment from day one.

• 18:09Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah, and the power of the ocean is also a pitfall.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 18:15Flora Lichtman?

  Deborah Greaves is a professor of ocean engineering at the University of Plymouth in England, and she's also the director of the Supergen Offshore Renewable Energy Hub. Deborah, thanks for talking to me today.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you very much.

• 18:31Flora Lichtman?

  Today's episode was produced by Dee Peterschmidt. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.