By DANA TIMS/YachatsNews.com
First-time visitors to Driftwood Beach State Recreation Site north of Waldport will see what appears to be the perfect spot to enjoy an afternoon picnic — a freshly paved parking lot, new curbs and sidewalks, a viewing platform, all leading to an idyllic stretch of sandy beach.
What won’t be apparent, however, is that just below the surface are buried the just-completed, on-shore components of PacWave South, the country’s first commercial-scale ocean-wave energy project.
The recreation site itself has been closed since last June to give crews the time and space to bore miles-long under-sea conduits linking onshore testing equipment to the ocean-based energy devices that will be tested here for commercial viability.
Although all the barricades are down now, the recreation site is now scheduled to officially reopen to the public on Tuesday.
“Getting everything installed for the on-land part of this project is a significant achievement,” Dan Hellin, PacWave’s deputy director, said. “It was a major engineering undertaking.”
Despite challenging and unforeseen obstacles, project managers remain hopeful that PacWave South’s critical seaward section can be completed sometime next summer, with operational testing possible in 2024.
The ocean testing area is located about seven miles offshore in an area separated from popular commercial and recreational fishing reefs. The testing area covers two square nautical miles and will be connected to a research monitoring center set for construction just north of Seal Rock.
Four in-water “berths” will allow up to 20 generating devices to be tested at a time, although project officials say they don’t anticipate that number to exceed four at any given time.
The berths are situated in water that ranges in depth from 213 feet to 256 feet.
When completed, electricity generated from the berths will be transmitted to the electrical grid.
Key to the next step is acquiring the huge cables that will eventually be pulled through the conduits to connect both ends of the project, said Burke Hales, the chief scientist behind the Oregon State University-led consortium that is building PacWave South.
And it’s here that the project is facing what is, arguably, its biggest challenge.
Constructing cables now the issue
The initial bidding process was aimed at finding a single contractor who could both design and build PacWave South, Hales said. But after talking with prospective bidders, it became clear that, rather than build the cables themselves, they preferred to install cables that had already been manufactured and delivered to them.
“We worked really hard to get it all in one package, but it just didn’t work out,” Hales said. “So now we are having to go in a very different direction, which means finding a company that will make the cables, then finding another one to actually install them.”
“We spent six months negotiating the original deal and now we are basically starting from scratch,” he said. “And it’s made all the more difficult because there are very few companies on earth who produce cables like this and in this length. It’s a very small pool.”
One company in that pool estimated that the timeframe for fabricating the type of cables the project needs can run anywhere from 12 to 15 months, Hales said. The difference between those two timetables, however, is tremendous in terms of when PacWave South can move into actual ocean testing.
“Twelve months for us works,” he said. “If we had the cables one year from now, everything would be great. But if we don’t get them until a year from September, we are looking at very possibly missing an entire construction season.”
Fall and winter are not the months anyone is going to get much done in terms of ocean construction projects, he said.
Still, Hales said he is hopeful that the project’s original timelines will be met.
“Every single piece of what we are doing is new,” he said. “It’s been really rewarding, but also extremely challenging.”
A picture of the entities and companies that will either conduct ocean-wave research or actually put their devices in the water for testing became clearer recently, when the U.S. Department of Energy approved $25 million to help underwrite the costs of the initial assortment of eight research projects.
Among the recipients are Portland State University, which will receive $4.5 million, and the University of Washington, which will get $1.3 million.
The other six recipients are Oscilla Power and Integral Consulting from Washington; CalWave Power Technologies and Dehlsen Associates from California; Columbia Power Technologies from Virginia; and, Littoral Power Systems from Massachusetts.
Currently, the only items placed in both PacWave South and in another, similarly sized area just north of Newport dubbed PacWave North, are two types of buoys that are collecting oceanographic and atmospheric data.
Each site has one “FLOATr” buoy that is reaches about eight feet above the water, has a yellow superstructure and a yellow and blue floatation area. The buoys, pinned to the ocean floor with large anchors, are providing information that provides real-time information about tidal strength and direction.
In addition, each site has two smaller “Spotter” buoys. They are about the size of a beach ball and are equipped with solar panels and an amber light.
Recent storms dragged the buoys just outside of the study areas they are intended to provide information for, Hales said. However, they were not displaced enough to cause managers to worry about immediately moving them back inside project boundaries.
“Eventually, we would like to get them back inside,” he said. “But they aren’t navigational hazards and we should have plenty of opportunity in the future to drag them back inside.”
- Dana Tims is an Oregon freelance writer who contributes regularly to YachatsNews.com. He can be reached at DanaTims24@gmail.com
To read more about the PacWave energy testing project, go here
