BY MICHELLE KLAMPE/OSU News Service
A project to build the nation’s first wave energy testing facility seven miles off the coast in Lincoln County has cleared a critical hurdle as the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management awarded Oregon State University a lease to operate in federal waters.
The approval last week for PacWave South is the first marine renewable energy research lease the agency has issued in federal waters off the West Coast. The estimated $80 million facility will be located offshore of Seal Rock, where testing facilities will be built.
The project still must receive licensing approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission before it can move forward. Obtaining the lease is an essential component of the licensing requirements.
Wave energy has the potential to provide clean, reliable electricity to meet the world’s rising energy demands, experts say. Globally, the marine energy market is projected to reach nearly $700 billion by 2050, and the World Energy Council estimates that 10 percent of the worldwide electricity demand could be met by harvesting ocean energy.
PacWave South will be the first pre-permitted, full-scale, utility grid-connected wave energy test site in the United States. It is designed to allow wave energy developers the opportunity to test different technologies for harnessing the energy of ocean waves.
Oregon State officials have completed the FERC application process and hope the license will be issued soon. Current timelines suggest construction could begin this summer, and the facility should be operational by 2023.
“The PacWave team initiated this collaborative process with several federal and state agencies nearly a decade ago,” said Burke Hales, the chief scientist for the project and a professor in Oregon State’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. “We’re excited for the opportunity to finalize this stage of the project and move a major step closer to construction.”
The PacWave ocean test site will be located about seven miles southwest of Newport on a sandy-bottomed stretch of the Pacific Ocean away from commercial and recreational fishing reefs. The ocean site will have four different testing “berths,” which combined can accommodate up to 20 total wave energy devices at any one time. Five power and data cables buried below the seafloor will connect the ocean test site to a testing facility near Seal Rock.
PacWave South is supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Energy, the state of Oregon and other public and private entities. Oregon State’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences is managing the construction and operation of the facility.
“We like to think of wave as the slow and steady tortoise complement to the full speed and stop character of wind and solar,” Hales told Oregon Public Broadcasting.
The industry has struggled to get off the ground. One reason is because wave energy devices need to be tested at scale in the harsh conditions of the ocean. Putting these large pieces of infrastructure into the water requires a comprehensive regulatory process and a lot of money.
A first-of-its-kind wave energy project proposed off the coast at Reedsport actually fizzled in 2014 due to high start-up costs. The PacWave facility would provide a designated spot to test wave energy technologies, eliminating many of those costs.
“The real world has challenges that are hard to actually mimic with a scaled or laboratory experiment,” Hales told OPB. “We’re building the facility that will let people do that.”
Oregon has a fairly harsh wave climate, which provides the rigor necessary to determine a device’s long-term viability. PacWave aims to test up to four devices at a time.
Hales said the lease is the last piece PacWave needs for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to issue a license and for other federal agencies to conduct their final reviews of the project.
Read previous stories on PacWave at YachatsNews
OSU trustees approve PacWave budget
PacWave leader talks project in Yachats
