Oregon Wave Energy Trust

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Deployment Effects of Marine Renewable Energy Technologies

To accelerate the adoption of these emerging marine hydrokinetic technologies, navigational and environmental issues and concerns must be identified and addressed. As hydrokinetic projects move forward, various stakeholders will need to be engaged; one of the key issues that project proponents face as they engage stakeholders is that many conflicting uses and environmental issues are not well-understood.  Much of this lack of understanding comes from a limited understanding of the technologies themselves.

To address this issue, in September 2008, RE Vision consulting, LLC, was selected by the Department of Energy, under their market acceleration program, to apply a scenario-based assessment approach to the emerging hydrokinetic technology sector. The goal was to improve understanding of potential environmental and navigation impacts of these technologies and focus stakeholders on the critical issues.

To learn more about RE Vision’s findings and view the reports, click here.

Program Helps Communities Explore Renewable Energy Options

Communities across Oregon will get some help this week in analyzing how renewable energy could be a part of their ongoing community development strategy.

Business Oregon’s Infrastructure Finance Authority (IFA) has approved eight grants to Oregon communities through the Renewable Energy Feasibility (REF) fund. The funding authority was set up in 2006 under Executive Order by the Governor as a method to assist municipalities in financing renewable energy feasibility studies.

“As regions throughout the state look to renewable energy as part of their energy portfolio in the future, we wanted to make sure there was a resource to help with the necessary feasibility studies,” said Lynn Schoessler, director of the IFA and deputy director of Business Oregon. “This program is a helpful component to the state’s clean technology development strategy.”

There has been great interest in the program thus far, Schoessler said. The fund has exhausted its allotted amount–which has ranged from $150,000 to $200,000–each year since its inception in 2006.

Under the REF rules, a renewable energy feasibility study provides an analytical assessment of the technical and economic viability of an existing or proposed publicly-owned facility or infrastructure project that uses renewable energy resources to generate electricity, heat and/or to manufacture a fuel.  Renewable energy resources are defined as water, wind, geothermal, solar, biomass, waste materials or waste fuels.

REF applicants must clearly demonstrate that proposed feasibility studies encourage energy efficiency and address the cost-effective use of available renewable energy resources.

Only public entities such as cities, counties, tribes, ports and special districts are eligible to apply. Complete information on the program is available online at www.orinfrastructure.org. For more information on Business Oregon’s Infrastructure Finance Authority, please visit the IFA at: http://www.oregonifa.org/.

Big buoy will help determine the future of wave energy off the Oregon coast

NEWPORT – Two and a half years after a wave energy test buoy sank off Newport, the drive to harness energy from the ocean is heating up again with plans for at least one buoy to be deployed off the central coast before the year’s end.

And there are hopes for a handful more not long after.

It’s all part of Oregon’s race to become a leader in wave energy technology, a competition that only three years ago threatened to deteriorate into a bitter battle pitting east coast developers against fishermen, surfers and others.

Many of them feared the buoys could harm fishing, recreation and tourism. But today, some say the situation exemplifies the spirit of collaboration and cooperation.
“Oregon has a lot to be proud of and a lot of people have shown a lot of leadership,” Onno Husing, executive director of Oregon Coastal Zone Management Association. “We are literally helping to figure this out for the nation.”

If that happens — if Oregon wins the wave energy race and does it well — proponents say it could someday mean $1 billion plus annually to this state.

The New Jersey-based Ocean Power Technologies is poised to deploy its first wave energy test buoy about 2.5 miles off the coast of Gardiner later this year. They expect to follow that one with nine others – potentially more – over a period of time, possibly as early as 2011, and hope to see the country’s first commercial wave energy park connected to the grid and generating power in the next five years.

Key to the process is a “settlement agreement” three years in the making between OPT and 15 state, federal and local entities. OPT spokesman Len Bergstein calls the document an “agreement to agree,” and expects it to be completed and signed any day.

“It’s a compact to study the problems extensively,” said Bergstein. “There are huge lists of rigorous studies that have to be undertaken. We’re going to put one buoy in the water and study the heck out of it.”

If those studies reveal problems, the agreement calls for OPT to adapt its operation to remedy them.

The agreement is one way stakeholders can maintain a say in the process, said Nick Furman , executive director of the Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission and chairman of the Southern Oregon Ocean Resource Coalition.

“We think it is important to be involved because if we are on the outside looking in, we have no say in the process,” said Furman. “We’ll be reviewing the studies, and as a member of the settlement agreement, we can say ’stop’ if the study shows something detrimental.”

The buoy is being built in Clackamas at Oregon Iron Works. It will be about a 140 feet long and 40 feet wide, with a 30-foot float rising out of the water. A doughnutlike float will move up and down on a spar, generating electricity that will go through an underwater substation, then travel underwater to the shore via a cable through an effluent pipeline.

Even as developers jump through regulatory hoops, scientists far from the electric hum are on a different sort of quest, predicting how the massive buoys will impact marine life and what they can do about it.

“We expect we will see some changes in the species where these developments will go in and we might see some changes in behavior,” said Sarah  Henkel , marine ecologist at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. “So when we think about where we want to site future development, we want to place them where we are comfortable seeing those kind of changes.”

Henkel will give a presentation on their work Saturday at the Marine Science Center.

Scientists have already begun observing the migration patterns of whales and seabirds so they will know if the patterns change after the buoy is installed, Henkel said. And while they can’t study the buoys until they are in the water, they have other ways of researching potential impacts on the marine world.

“We’re not going into this blind,” said Henkel. “There is a lot we can learn from other offshore operations in other parts of the world.”

Like oil platforms, the buoy OPT plans to use would be moored on a sandy bottom. So researchers know that the buoy, set above large concrete blocks, might displace fish, such as halibut and sole. But it might also attract species like crabs which prefer to live on the fringe between sand and rocks, Henkel said.

They also know they will have to deal with bio fouling – the colonies of mussels, scallops and others that will cling to the buoy.

They will have to be scraped from the buoy. That, in turn, will create shell mounds below, a great dinner buffet for crabs, but one that might result in low oxygen conditions, which is already a problem of the Oregon coast, said Henkel.

What they are less certain of is how will the buoys impact migrating whales? Will they emit enough noise to warn the whales away or will existing noise from boat traffic mask the sound possibly leading whales to become tangled in the buoy lines?

Another question: Will seabirds become confused by buoy lights or conversely, not see the buoys at all and collide with them?

“We are taking this in very methodical, step by step way,” said Henkel. “There are opportunities along the way to make adjustments to the buoys. We’re not sure what the adjustments might need to be, but we are getting out in front doing a lot of baseline studies prior to anything being deployed. We’re progressing at a good rate”

Oregon In Good, But Not Great Shape For Wave Energy

A new study on Oregon’s capacity for wave energy suggests the state is in good, but not great shape, to take advantage of the infant technology.

The Oregon Wave Energy Trust commissioned the study to get a broad sense of where the state is ready to implement wave energy – and where it’s not. Buoys are in the testing phase on the Oregon Coast.

The study found that the state has the manufacturers, transportation infrastructure, and workforce to exploit wave technology – at least potentially.

But the energy trust’s executive director, Jason Busch, said all of those factors could be improved. Busch said the study highlights a need for energy developers who’ve generally focused on other coastlines.

“So we’re interested in attracting those kind of companies, and also developing our own expertise,” he said.

Busch said Oregon’s university system is heavily involved in wave technology.

But the study recommends that community colleges do more to train future workers.

Download the study (PDF)