The Current - Harnessing ocean waves to power your home

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

Imagine powering your home by tapping into the relentless energy of the ocean’s waves. Scientists in Oregon are trying to make that dream a reality, testing devices that could turn the motion of the ocean into a staggering amount of electricity. 

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. Imagine powering your home using the endless motion of the ocean. In Newport, Oregon, scientists are working on making that a reality. A $100 million project called PacWave is leading the charge and harnessing the power of the waves.

Burke Hales is the chief scientist behind the project. He is in Corvallis, Oregon. Burke, hello. Good morning. I think anybody who has spent any time in the ocean knows that you can feel the energy of a wave. How exactly do you turn those waves into electricity? There's a really wide diversity of devices. There are devices that, you know,

move up and down at the surface with the waves and those induce, you know, through a tether, they induce rotational motion that drives the generator. There are devices that allow waves to surge into the interior of the device, compressing air and running turbines on that compressed air. There are devices that have pendulums, almost like an old grandfather clock. And as the waves rock the surface devices back and forth, the pendulum swings underneath. There are devices that wobble on the sea surface, and within those devices, they have asymmetric flywheel devices that, as the device wobbles, they start to build a rotation, and you can capture energy from that. There are devices that oscillate pistons with the internal movement of the device and generate power from that,

they're devices that have almost what I would call flappers, and the flappers move back and forth with the surface waves, and then they drive piston pumps below to generate hydraulic power. There's this huge diversity, and the reason that there's this huge diversity is that we really haven't had the opportunity as have, for example, the wind turbine industry to figure out what the most optimal design is. And that largely is because of the bottleneck of full-scale testing. And that's what you're doing with this testing project is to try to figure out what the best form of that technology would be? That's the idea.

the best form of that technology would be? That's the idea. We provide the facility, the playing field, for the developers who produce the devices to get real-time testing and to figure out how to optimize and ultimately to figure out, is there a single design that's best for all waves? Do certain types of waves require a different device than others? That really is what the test facility is designed

to support. How big of a setup would you need to generate a reasonable amount of energy from waves? There's a device that's called the Ocean Energy Buoy, and it's one of these devices that allows the waves to surge in and generate compressed air. It produces about a megawatt of electrical power, and it's quite large. The chamber through which the waves surge is the size of a fairly large building. And so these can be very large devices. And in order to generate that kind of power and capture the types of waves that they want to, that often is required. There are other devices that work sort of more on the swarm of bees concept. So many, many small devices connected together in an array.

And so we're talking about significant marine operational commitments to putting these devices out. You have to have the right kind of vessels. You have to have the right kind of anchoring systems. You have to have the right kind of materials. The ocean is a fairly hostile place. It's corrosive. It's highly energetic. The survivability is another key factor that these developers have to account for. I was going to say, how do you make the technology such that it will survive in the ocean?

The ocean is a wild, powerful place. Yeah, it is. And that's a question for the developers. And so there are developers who adaptively move their devices. developers who adaptively move their devices. And so we've had some really tremendously huge waves out off our coast right now. This bomb cyclone atmospheric river system that's coming in is generating hurricane level winds and waves that are 10 meters in amplitude. And many devices would prefer not to experience those conditions. And so a number of the developers that are out there are actually building devices that will winch themselves down below the sea surface when they detect tensions on their mooring systems.

They'll actually submerge and avoid the most destructive of the waves. But that's only one approach. But I would say that's an active and open area of research, is how do you build in seaworthiness and survivability to these devices while also producing power? What is the potential here? I had read, and the statistic kind of leapt out just because of the scale of it, that there's enough energy in the waves that we might be able to get access to

that could power, what, a third of all the homes in the United States? Yeah, I think there are a number of estimates like that. The number that I've heard is 20% of U.S. domestic electricity demand, which might include industrial demand as well as domestic. That's a lot. That's a lot.

It is a lot. But the important thing is that it's not all of it, right? And so if you want to do renewable energy to power your economy, your society, you have to have the diverse portfolio of renewable components. Wave is a complementary component to wind and solar, which are both higher yield, but also much more erratic. And so having this sort of steady, more persistent backbone of power supply from wave is complementary to these more volatile renewable sources. If this is successful and it gets scaled up, what sort of impact do you think it would have on the marine ecosystem? Well, you know, we believe that the impacts of this particular facility are minimal. We believe the permitters agreed with us because they awarded us the license.

But we're also required to carry out a substantial amount of ongoing monitoring to make sure that those predictions are held up. And so what do we worry about? Well, we worry about things like acoustic signals. So these devices, you know, anything that goes in the ocean, you know, you throw a rock in the ocean and it makes an acoustic signal. These devices, you know, they're mechanical devices and they'll make sounds. Now, they don't have engines, right? They don't have propellers. So we don't expect them to make sounds, particularly at the frequencies that might impact, you know, whale communication or navigation. But we're monitoring that all the time. And we've got requirements for, you know, exceedance of background thresholds that we have to address if they're detected.

We worry about whether or not we damage the seafloor in areas where we place an anchor. And we've got a benthic ecological monitoring component to our work to make sure that we're accounting for that. We also know that whatever you put in the water, whether it's a fishing lure or a piling, organisms in the ocean interact with that. piling organisms in the ocean interact with that. And so, you know, we know that certain fish types are attracted to structure that gets put in areas that didn't otherwise have that. And so, you know, you might change the distribution of fishes that are in the area of the wave energy test site in comparison to what was there before. of the wave energy test site in comparison to what was there before.

And I think, you know, if you think about the Gulf of Mexico, the oil rigs there have become these destinations for fishers because they're providing structure and substrate that the fish are attracted to. So we're also studying fish attraction. And so these are the kinds of things that are incorporated in our permitting, but also in our required monitoring. Folks up here, I think when they hear about this project, their mind might go to what people have been trying to do in the Bay of Fundy in terms of harnessing the extraordinarily powerful tides there and working with tidal energy. I mean, this is the long history of these large-scale projects, many of which have crashed onto the shore and not been successful. How is this different than those projects?

I'm going to say it's different because fundamentally capturing tidal energy is a different mechanical engineering approach. So tides produce currents, and we know very well how to harvest energy from linear movement. Winds and currents that spin turbines are things that we understand fairly well. Whereas when we talk about waves, we're talking about oscillatory motion, which is a completely different animal as far as how do we convert oscillatory motion into an electrical power producing mechanism. And that's complicated. That's part of the reason why there's this diversity of approaches out there in the industry.

The, you know, the question of whether or not the devices are seaworthy, that's critical. And I don't know that our environment is any more benign than the Bay of Fundy. We don't have the tidal current drivers out here in this sort of unrestricted open coastline. But we do have tremendously powerful storms. The storm that we're experiencing right now has generated some waves approaching 10 meters and some winds up in the 50-knot kind of range. And so survivability of devices,

the seaworthiness of these devices is critically important. And how developers address that, how do they avoid the damaging conditions while being able to capture the energy from the favorable conditions? They're all part of the designs that the field of developers are addressing. You've also had buy-in from the Biden administration, which announced in the fall, what, up to $112.5 million going to the development of wave energy converters. This is the largest federal investment in marine energy ever. Do you worry that that investment perhaps is in jeopardy because of a new administration whose motto is drill, baby, drill? jeopardy because of a new administration whose motto is drill, baby, drill?

Well, you know, you talk about the ocean being a hostile environment. I'm going to try to avoid the dangers of this one. You know, we as an exploratory facility with funding that has been based on appropriations on each successive budget, we have always been very attuned to the federal support of this project. We've been through a Trump administration before, and the Trump administration did not do anything that appeared to reduce the funding of marine hydrokinetic energy research and testing. You know, it may be different, but we think the Department of Energy is committed to building this diverse portfolio of renewables. And we think that the funding is likely to continue. We've got great delegation support here on the West Coast. And so we, you know, we're hopeful that things will continue. But it's also critically important that, you know, we've largely finished the construction of this facility.

And so the investment that the Department of Energy has put into building this facility has been realized. It's done. We've constructed this sort of one-of-a-kind facility off the coast here. And now we're talking about supporting folks actually using the facility afterwards. So we're hopeful that support continues. We're hopeful that we show the success of the facility in furthering this energy development and that we begin attracting developers from private sector and and even international um areas so we we're hopeful that just the value of the facility will sustain it

i'll let you go but i mean when you think about the promise of this if this works what could it be i mean we live you now have the un climate conference and there's a lot of hand-wringing and hair-pulling because it doesn't seem like the urgency of the moment is being met by those who are there trying to hammer out a deal. The attracting thing about this is that this is something that promises something, a measure of a solution in some ways to the crisis that we're facing. What do you think the promise here is? we're facing. What do you think the promise here is? Well, you know, I think it's challenging to sum that up succinctly because it not only is technical, you know, and which is my focus, but it's, you know, it's economical, it's societal. You know, what we anticipate is that wave becomes a complementary part of the international renewable energy portfolio.

a complementary part of the international renewable energy portfolio. And we anticipate that, you know, we think we're about 20 years behind wind. And so we think, you know, maybe in a decade, we will see a device that has successfully tested at our facility actually go into commercial operation or municipal operation elsewhere. There are obviously places where, you know, wave energy is a better resource than others. And so we're unlikely to see wave devices just ringing coastlines around the world because the resources and the onshore support infrastructure is determinate about whether or not a wave energy device can be feasible. But yeah, I believe that in the next decade or so we'll start to see

wave energy becoming, you know, megawatt scale contributions to local power grids. We'll be watching. This is really, really interesting. And it's just neat to hear how it actually works. Again, for people who have been out cursing the waves, because as you said, they've been seasick on a boat. This is wave power for good. Burke, thank you very much for this. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for the opportunity. Burke Hales is the chief scientist at PacWave and a professor at Oregon State University. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.