This summer, an boxy yellow platform called the Ocean Sentinel will anchor in heavy swells off the Oregon coast and help open a new stage in the effort to turn wave energy into usable electricity.
Built at a cost of $1.5 million, the rugged craft will loosen a bottleneck that has dogged the startup wave-energy industry: Getting equipment out of the lab and tested in the brutal conditions of the open ocean.
Europe has a similar device, but the Oregon berth is the first mobile platform to be deployed in U.S. waters and that is available for use by small firms that couldn't afford to do testing in any other way.
"This testing capability is a first for wave energy," said Annette von Jouanne, a professor of electrical engineering at Oregon State University (OSU) who came up with the idea.
"It helps developers to test, demonstrate and advance their devices. It helps them share information about their devices with investors, accelerate their time to market, hasten wave installations, and answer questions of environmental impact."
The wave-energy industry is at a younger stage than the wind or solar industries, which have coalesced around a few basic designs that seem to work best. Experimental wave-energy generators come in all sizes and shapes, including gizmos that resemble buoys, snakes or giant clamshells.
Running and monitoring a device in the open ocean is far more difficult than doing so for a solar panel or wind turbine; it is, after all, out at sea, and running cable to shore is expensive and requires permits that are hard to get.
To date, offshore testing has been limited to some of the larger developers that can afford their own platforms and the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC), which has an offshore testing berth in Scotland's Orkney Islands. But the Ocean Sentinel is the first such platform in North America.
The Ocean Sentinel will first be deployed only in a mile-square zone off the coast of Newport, Oregon, during the summer months when the ocean swells are relatively gentle. These are the only circumstances under which state and federal authorities will allow it to operate. But if it proves reliable, the Ocean Sentinel could be moved -- and duplicated -- to test devices in ocean conditions anywhere, von Jouanne said.
It will be available for several enterprises to use. Many wave-energy companies have already tested their devices at OSU's onshore wave-simulation labs, including Columbia Power Technologies, M3 Wave Energy Systems, and Neptune Wave Power. Several companies have expressed interest in using the new platform, von Jouanne said.
The Ocean Sentinel is being developed by the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center (NMMREC), which is a joint project of OSU, the University of Washington and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
The first company to hook its device to the berth will be WET-NZ, a New Zealand company that plans to use the Ocean Sentinel for two or three months, according to Justin Klure, a managing partner of Northwest Energy Innovations, which is WET-NZ's partner in the U.S.
"The ability to leverage the resources in Oregon provides for an ideal location for testing of the device," Klure said in an email. "Also, NNMREC location helps WET-NZ analyze environmental data for future commercial developments on the West Coast."
A key purpose of the Ocean Sentinel is to learn how it interacts with the sea life around it, according to Sean Moran, the ocean test facilities manager for NNMREC.
In that respect, the platform's first home offshore of Newport is one of the most well-measured patches of ocean anywhere. OSU marine specialists have studied its background acoustics, the contour of the sea bottom, the nature of its sea life and the electromagnetic frequency -- all valuable baseline information, Moran said.
The Ocean Sentinel is a souped-up version of the NOMAD, a sturdy offshore meteorological platform used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to make weather forecasts. It captures a spectrum of wave and weather data, and even more importantly, stores and gathers information on the electricity created by the wave-energy generator, which will be anchored at a distance and connected by a 600-foot-long umbilical cable.
The berth is outfitted with cameras and beams its data back to shore wirelessly, and supplies its own power with onboard solar panels, wind turbines and a biodiesel-powered generator.
