Posts Tagged ‘Ocean Sentinel’

Wave Energy: Testing the Future in Oregon

Tuesday, November 20th, 2012

By NOAA Coastal Services Center

In August, one of the first public wave energy testing facilities in the U.S. began operation in the ocean waters off Oregon’s coast. This mobile system will be used by companies and academic researchers to test new wave energy technology, measure and understand the wave resources, and study potential environmental issues.

It’s also a reminder for coastal resource managers across the country of the need to prepare as much as possible for the emerging ocean energy industry.

“There’s no doubt that energy exists in the ocean,” says Justin Klure, a managing partner with Pacific Energy Ventures, LLC. “I don’t know if it will be commercially viable 5, 10, or 20 years from now, but when you look at the trends regarding energy consumption, it’s clear that new alternative forms of generating electricity are required, and the ocean is an untapped frontier.”

He adds, “The potential of a significant renewable resource is what keeps everyone in the industry engaged and excited. How to do it in a way that protects the ecosystem and current uses is really the challenge.”

Many hope that the Ocean Sentinel—and other such testing facilities—will help shed light on some of the questions that wave energy poses.

The Oregon Coastal Management Program and Oregon Sea Grant Program, along with many other state and federal regulatory agencies, played an important role in permitting the testing facility while working to minimize environmental impacts and conflicts with other coastal uses, such as fishing and navigation.

The state is mapping out its regulatory process for marine renewable energy in a new chapter being developed for the Territorial Sea Plan, Oregon’s ocean planning document.

Ocean Energy
Potentially, there are many ways to tap the ocean for energy, including wind, tides, currents, salinity, and even its thermal features. While the Atlantic Coast is ideal for the development of the offshore wind industry, waves may be the most promising source of ocean energy for the Pacific Northwest.

Wave power devices extract energy directly from surface waves or from pressure fluctuations below the surface. Waves off the coasts of California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii have been identified as good sites for the development of wave energy.

Researchers believe that, as wave technology improves, less ideal wave environments might become more accessible as energy sources and that wave energy facilities could be sited further offshore.

Great Unknown
While pilot projects around the world have reported little to no environmental impacts, the greatest unknown about wave energy is how a large commercial facility will affect the ocean environment.

Potential environmental impacts include withdrawal of wave energy from the ecological system, interactions with marine life such as migrating gray whales, atmospheric and oceanic emissions, noise, bottom impacts from anchors, and visual appearances. Environmental impacts from cable landings are a concern, as are electrical and magnetic energy imparted into seawater. A wave energy facility could pose a threat to navigation.

Wave energy facilities could also have environmental benefits, such as acting as artificial reefs.

Testing, Testing
With funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, the $1.5 million Ocean Sentinel was deployed off the coast of Oregon the week of August 22 by the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center (NNMREC), a collaborative center with Oregon State University and the University of Washington as partners.

The bright yellow Ocean Sentinel structure is a standard National Operational Model Archive and Distribution System (NOMADS) and NOAA buoy platform that is shaped like a boat. Equipped with an array of measuring instruments, the Ocean Sentinel floats on the water’s surface and is set up in a one-square-mile test site two miles northwest of Yaquina Head off the Oregon Coast.

Wave energy devices are hooked up to the mobile test facility’s instrument panel, which can measure the amplitude of waves, energy output, ocean currents, and the speed of the wind. Data on environmental factors, such as variations in acoustics, electromagnetic fields, differences in marine life, sediment, and more, are also being collected. Real-time data are transmitted back to land through Wi-Fi and cellular connections.

The first device to be tested was the Wet-NZ, developed by private industry and the government of New Zealand.

“The Ocean Sentinel provides an alternative to needing to bring cable all the way back to shore,” notes Kaety Hildenbrand, marine fisheries extension faculty member for Oregon State University and Oregon Sea Grant Extension.

Site selection for an estimated $25 million “grid-connected” testing facility for larger wave energy devices is currently underway off Oregon’s coast.

Relationship Building
One of the important roles for Oregon coastal resource managers in addressing the Ocean Sentinel and the state’s marine spatial planning efforts for ocean energy has been working to ensure open communication among industry, researchers, fishermen, state and federal agencies, and many other stakeholders.

“Sea Grant has helped us with all of our community outreach and has been indispensable in helping us develop relationships,” notes Belinda Batten, director of the NNMREC.

She adds, “Most developers don’t think about how important that is. You’ve got to talk to the local communities and fishermen. This is their coast and their ocean.”

Hildenbrand and other Sea Grant staff members have helped with outreach by facilitating many town hall meetings, conferences, and discussions with community leaders, as well as helping to create siting plans and engage with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process to look at potential environmental impacts.

Keeping It Consistent
The Coastal Zone Management Act’s federal consistency clause has also been key, says Juna Hickner, coastal state–federal relations coordinator for the Oregon Coastal Management Program.

“The project needed to go through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to get a permit,” Hickner explains, “and any time there’s a federal permit, it has to be approved as consistent with our networked coastal management program.”

Hickner coordinated various state agency reviews of the permit, worked with networked state agencies to make sure their concerns were addressed through the federal permitting process, and issued the final statement on behalf of the state that the project is consistent with Oregon’s coastal management program.

New Chapter
In 1995, Oregon approved its Territorial Sea Plan, a robust institutional framework for ocean resource management. The plan established policies and procedures, coordinated state agencies, and provided a strategy for protecting rocky shores, the state’s most significant marine habitat.

“Through the planning process,” says Paul Klarin, marine affairs coordinator for the Oregon Coastal Management Program, “we incorporated NNMREC into the Territorial Sea Plan, recognizing their Newport ocean-test facility as a special-use site devoted to renewable energy testing. Basically we gave them the space to operate in and some simple standards to apply to any devices that they deploy there.”

The state is in the process of developing a new chapter for the Territorial Sea Plan to prepare for larger wave-energy testing sites and the potential for commercial proposals. The new chapter will include a spatial-mapping component with 200 data layers, a resource inventory, and review and regulatory standards.

“We’re lucky to have the Territorial Sea Plan already in place,” notes Patty Snow, program manager for the Oregon Coastal Management Program. “It gives us a framework to look at this new use of the territorial sea, work with our partner agencies to look at the effects, and fulfill the requirements to conserve marine resources and ecological function.”

“The inherent challenge,” Batten notes, “is that these projects have never been done before. Even though the technology is going to change over time—maybe significantly—we can begin now to frame how we will analyze the potential effects, and that’s critical.”

She adds, “I would encourage managers to get out in front of this issue. Be engaged early.”

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Wave Power Anticipation Builds In Oregon

Tuesday, September 18th, 2012
By Pete Danko

We bounced over four-foot swells outside Yaquina Bay, speeding along in Crackerjack, Capt. Jack Craven’s 43-foot charter. It was a calm early September day by the rambunctious standards of the Oregon coast, a stretch of the North American continent frequently battered by waves taller than your house – even if you live in a two-story. But even a quiet Pacific pulses with awesome power.

“If we could just grab a tiny piece of this energy,” I found myself thinking – an unoriginal thought if there ever was one. The idea of pinching off a little Pacific power has excited interest for years, and had in fact led to the development we were headed out to see: the Ocean Sentinel test pod and its temporary companion, the New Zealand born and Oregon schooledwave energy converter called WET-NZ.

wet-nzThe WET-NZ, off the Oregon coast (image via Pete Danko/EarthTechling)

A handful of scientists from the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center at Oregon State University, who put the Ocean Sentinel in the water, was aboard the Crackerjack, along with Justin Klure, an executive at Northwest Energy Innovations, the Oregon company that retooled the Kiwi WET-NZ into the second-generation, half-scale test model being put through its paces 2.5 miles northwest of Yaquina Head.

Reporters were along for the ride, as well, most of them getting their introduction to this new wave energy thing that suddenly was being talked about in Oregon in a big way – bigger, perhaps, than it really ought to at this point.

Earlier this month, The New York Times wrote a story about the planned upcoming deployment of an Ocean Power Technologies wave energy converting buoy off the coast near Reedsport, about 70 miles south of Newport. Shortly thereafter, The Oregonian, the Portland media heavyweight, editorialized breathlessly that because wave energy might prove to be a “runaway success at sea” like the “near-overnight sensation of wind farms,” state regulators needed to “get ahead of the wave power rush” that “could test Oregon’s capacity to plan and regulate ocean use to the satisfaction of multiple stakeholders and for the protection of fisheries and marine ecosystems.”

Whoa. Deep breath, Oregonian.

The wind power that became a “near-overnight sensation” had been operating commercially and at a large scale in California for decades before it busted out in Oregon. All renewable technologies are constantly evolving, but the basic format of wind power was long well-established before the boom of the past several years.

Wave? It’s commonly said that wave energy is in its infancy, but that might be overstating its development. Conception has occurred. The fetus is growing. Birth? We haven’t gotten there yet.

“We’ve got so much to learn,” Sean Moran, manager of the wave energy ocean test facilities for NNMREC, told me dockside before we headed out to sea. “There are tons of different designs that function very differently. We don’t really know what’s going to work and what isn’t – there’s a lot of work to do.”

Not that Moran isn’t excited – he’s in the field because he’s jazzed about the possibilities. But what was clear from the NNMREC and OSU scientists was that even more than hoping to help wave energy developers improve their wares, they’re interested in making sure wave energy unfolds in Oregon in a way that doesn’t screw the environment, commercial fishers and crabbers or those who use the ocean for recreation.

The OSU researchers are monitoring electromagnetic fields and acoustical impacts, as well as effects on sediment, invertebrates and fish.

“This is why we’re here,” Moran said. “It’s an opportunity to learn, to go forward in a way that makes sense for all the stakeholders here. Wave energy is just one player and it’s going to have to fit into a complex picture.”

ocean sentinel, nnmrecOcean Sentinel (image via Pete Danko/EarthTechling)

A representative of the Oregon Anglers told The Times, “Our greatest concern is that they don’t do what they did with dams — put a lot of them in the ocean and then just stand back and see what happens.”

Anglers and others are wise to keep a close eye on the wave developers, but the difference in pace and scale between what’s going on with wave energy and what happened with Northwest dam building is night and day.

Out of nowhere in the 1930s, Roosevelt’s Bureau of Reclamation built the biggest structure in the history of the world when it made Grand Coulee Dam (without fish ladders, by the way, robbing the Colville tribe of the salmon that were the centerpiece of their culture).  By 1984, there were 14 dams on the Columbia, and more than that on its tributary the Snake, forever changing ecosystems on a massive scale.

There is very little chance of wave energy having that irretrievable impact on the ocean. Even if the industry were ready, there is no Roosevelt to put thousands of wave energy converters in the ocean. This is an industry — a fascinating, exciting industry, but also a wannabe industry — that is inching along.

The New Zealand group behind the WET-NZ deployed a proof of concept device six years ago. Quarter-scale devices came five years later. Even if the Oregon arm of the project goes well, they’re still at least another iteration – with loads of testing along the way – away from nailing down their design.

And Ocean Power Technologies, yes, it will put a 150-kilowatt buoy in the water, weather permitting, in early October. It took OPT years to get its license from the feds to put 10 buoys in the water, but even that won’t happen until the first buoy survives and produces power for a year (and a grid connection won’t happen until then, at the earliest, as well).

And hanging over all this is the question of whether wave energy can be anywhere in the neighborhood of competitive in what could be a long era of cheap natural gas (and with solar and wind both falling in cost). Investors aren’t exactly flocking to it, and government support, already modest, doesn’t figure to blossom. OPT will need more help if it’s to get those other nine buoys in the water. The state-backed Oregon Wave Energy Trust is doing what it can, and the U.S. Department of Energy has been chipping in, but the years ahead do not figure to be flush times for the state government or the feds.

Meanwhile, everyone is watching. The fishing community, environmentalists, scientists – even some journalists. Out on the water earlier this month, it was hard not to feel the excitement about the great possibilities. But back ashore, the reality of the long, fraught process wave power faces is clear. Deep breaths, everyone.

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Northwest Energy Innovations Deploys First Wave Energy Converter at National Marine Renewable Energy Center

Tuesday, September 4th, 2012

Innovative ocean renewable energy technology makes U.S. debut off the coast of Oregon

After a multi-day installation operation, Northwest Energy Innovations (NWEI), a Portland-based company, has successfully installed a wave energy device off the coast of Newport, Oregon. The device, known as Wave Energy Technology-New Zealand (WET-NZ), is now deployed at the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center’s (NNMREC) open ocean test facility.

“This is a huge milestone for the WET-NZ technology, for Oregon, and for the wave energy industry as a whole”, said NWEI Program Manager Justin Klure. “We are excited to have the opportunity to lead the deployment of the WET-NZ device off Oregon’s coast with the support of NNMREC, our funding partners and a host of marine professionals”, Klure added.

Sean Moran, NNMREC’s Ocean Test Facilities Manager, also acknowledged the success, “NWEI is blazing the trail for this industry in Oregon. Through testing in our facility they are helping to answer core questions about wave energy for a broad community of stakeholders.”
The device deployed off the Oregon coast is a second generation, half-scale iteration of the WET-NZ technology. Power generated by the device is transmitted through an underwater cable to the test center’s instrumentation buoy (the Ocean Sentinel), which dissipates the electricity and records power performance data.

An innovative, multi-mode wave energy converter, the WET-NZ maximizes energy capture by harnessing power from the heave, pitch and surge motions of passing waves. The technology is the product of a research consortium between Industrial Research Limited, a Crown Research Institute, and Power Projects Limited, a Wellington-based private company. NWEI began collaborating with the consortium in 2010 to further the WET-NZ design and introduce it to the U.S. market.

This deployment is part of NWEI’s program to advance the WET-NZ in the U.S., which is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Oregon Wave Energy Trust. NWEI will utilize performance data from the operation to refine Cost-of-Energy calculations and develop a business plan responsive to the U.S. market.

According to OWET executive director Jason Busch, “OWET’s mission is to responsibly develop the ocean energy industry in Oregon, and helping NWEI get the WET-NZ in the water is a major step towards achieving that goal. In-ocean testing will move the technology towards commercialization and lead to a better understanding of technology performance and impacts in real-world conditions. This is a major accomplishment for NWEI, NNMREC and Oregon.”

The testing is scheduled to continue through the end of September. Additional information about the project is available at www.NWEnergyInnovations.com.

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Wave Energy Devices Put To Test In Oregon

Tuesday, August 28th, 2012
By Pete Danko

It’s not grid-connected – that type of test center, considered vital to commercializing wave energy, is still in the development stages – but the Pacific Northwest now has a place for companies and scientists to put new wave power devices through their paces.

The Ocean Sentinel began operating off the Oregon coast near Newport last week, according to Oregon State University, which is home to the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center, a joint project with the University of Washington.

wave energy device test, ocean sentinel, oregon
Ocean Sentinel (image via Oregon State University)

“We’re still trying to figure out what will happen when some of these devices have to stand up to 50-foot waves,” Sean Moran, ocean test facilities manager with NNMREC, said in a statement. “The ocean environment is very challenging, especially off Oregon where we have such a powerful wave energy resource.”

Being able to test devices is expected to be a boon for firms and researchers looking to develop wave power devices. Moran said the Ocean Sentinel will provide a “standardized, accurate system to compare various wave energy technologies.”

One wave power device has already been extensively tested for placement in Oregon waters – the PowerBuoy made by Ocean Power Technologies. The company just received its federal license to go forward with a plan to put up to 10 of the devices in the Pacific a couple of miles off the coast near Reedsport. But it wasn’t tested in Oregon: Instead, it got a thorough going-over in Scottish waters.

Scotland has become a center for the wave and tidal industry, in part because of the European Marine Energy Center, which has grid connection and 14 full-scale test berths. With grid connection, wave energy devices can be certified to Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers  and other international standards, while also providing power to the local grid.

The NNMREC is eager to do something similar in the Pacific Northwest, though on a slightly smaller scale, with the Pacific Marine Energy Center. While the Ocean Sentinel “is a critical step forward, developers and policymakers alike have determined that a full-scale, grid connected ocean test facility is needed to achieve industry commercialization and fully reap the benefits of this clean, renewable energy resource,” the NNMREC said earlier this year.

The NNMREC held forums in coastal cities last week to explore where to site the Pacific Marine Energy Center, with waters off Newport, Reedsport, Coos Bay and Camp Rilea under consideration.

The Ocean Sentinel will operated in a 1-square-mile patch of the ocean about two miles northwest of Yaquina Head, according to Oregon State University. In addition to studying how wave energy devices fare in the waters, the program hopes to measure “potential environmental impacts, whether they might come from electromagnetic fields, changes in acoustics, or other factors,” the university said.

ocean sentinel schematic
image via Oregon State University

According to the university (see schematic above), the Ocean Sentinel consists of a power analysis/data acquisition device and an adjustable load bank (ALB). The data is sent via wireless to the university’s Hatfield Marine Science Center, where it can be crunched to give “RMS voltage and current, frequency, real and reactive power, power factor, harmonic content and other quantitative analyses.” The ALB dissipates the energy generated.

Development of the $1.5 million Ocean Sentinel was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Oregon Department of Energy and the Oregon Wave Energy Trust.

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Wave Energy Test Device Ready To Deploy

Friday, August 17th, 2012

The Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center, otherwise known as NNMREC has been working to get a test facility buoy in the water off of Lincoln County called The Ocean Sentinel. The test buoy will be put in the ocean just NW of the Yaquina Head lighthouse by next week. NNMREC invited stakeholders out on Monday to the Toledo Boat Yard to see the Ocean Sentinel and the WET-NZ wave energy converter devices.

These devices are currently at the boat yard for final assembly and are being readied for deployment. According to Sean Moran the NNMREC test berth manager they have all of the permits and have the anchor and mooring systems out and are ready to get the device in the water. He said they are doing the final dry land testing right now and want to make sure everything is ready to go out to sea.

He said the deployment will take about a week to get the devices out to sea and then get everything connected together at the test site. Moran emphasized that the device will not be connected to the power grid. He said the grid connection to land can be very expensive. The device being tested is from a company called NW Energy Innovations a New Zealand Company. The majority of the device was actually made at the Oregon Iron Works in Portland.

According to Kaety Hildenbrand with OSU Sea Grant program testing these devices first is very important to make sure the device is working properly, to see if it stays on it’s mooring system, the type of power it could produce and the power quality from the engineering perspective.

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