 Again, here we are Wednesday at Hawaii, the state of clean energy. We have a real treat for you today. We're going to be talking about wave power for Hawaii, a little update, and talk about the new buoy, new boy, in town, a little play on words there. So I have from H&EI my colleague, Pat Cross, who's the project manager for our wave energy test site over in Kenioa Bay. And of course we have Jay Futale, owner, operator, CEO, chairman of the board of Think Tech Hawaii. I think of the chairman of the board, Think Tech Hawaii. So thanks for coming on, Jay, and helping me out. Thanks for having us on the show, Mitch. You're welcome, Jay. So we have a special treat as we go for Show of the Week, which is a beautiful video that was produced by Royer Studios, a Hollywood movie producer that H&EI uses for our really first class movies. If you don't mind rolling it, I think you'll all enjoy this. It's got some fabulous waves in it, so important. The future for wave energy is potentially limitless. And while it's understandable to think that the generation of electricity from wave energy is something that works best in rough seas, such as the North Atlantic or the coast of the northwestern United States, there's also strong potential for the use of wave energy generators in much less energetic environments throughout the world. Here we see the Azora, a wave energy prototype, being prepared for deployment to the US Navy's wave energy test site, located in Hawaii near Kaneohe Bay, Oahu, for testing through spring 2016. Being developed by four independent companies whose projects have been approved and are supported by the US Department of Energy and the US Navy. The Hawaii Natural Energy Institute is responsible to the sponsors for data collection, analysis, and reporting, as a means of independently evaluating the technology's performance. H&EI is also carrying out environmental monitoring to assess potential impacts these devices may have on the environments where they're deployed. Four of the planned five devices are what are called point absorbers, which are essentially an ocean buoy designed to move around in the waves, and the different companies have different approaches to converting that movement into electrical generation. The Azora device is a pair of vertical spars with a large heavy heave plate at the bottom underwater, and then a float that extends between the two vertical spars and moves with the waves and converts that movement to electricity. Here at the US Navy's wave energy test site, known as WETS, the research will be used in ongoing efforts to advance the marine renewable energy industry. At present, it's still very difficult to capture wave energy and convert it into electricity in a way that is commercially competitive with other renewables or with fossil fuels. However, population and energy demand around coastlines are both very high worldwide, and the wave resource is enormous, making wave energy technology an attractive long-term proposition. Ultimately, the idea for a commercial future for wave energy would be arrays of devices, not single devices like will be tested here at a scale of, say, 500 kilowatts or a megawatt, but lots of them. That's the way we're going to get toward commercialization of wave energy is deploying it in scale. WETS is the only grid-connected wave energy test site in the United States and one of only a few in the entire world. The world's eyes are really on this test site and the results that we will produce here over the next few years, so it's really, it's fun to be part of. Well, we're back. I hope you all enjoyed that great video, which is going to propel us to show of the week, I hope. So make sure you put in your thumbs up when you see this. So, Pat, so we had you here about 36 weeks ago, as I recall. That long? Yeah, that long, believe it or not, but a lot has happened at the wave energy test site. Some of those buoys we saw are no longer there and you've got the big buoy, pardon the pun, coming in. So why don't you just, you have some slides and so you can call them up when you need them and just tell us what are the changes, what's going on now? Okay, well, I'll give you sort of an overview of what we've been doing since 36 weeks ago, which is basically we've had that, the wave buoy you saw in the video deployed twice, did some modifications to it after the way it looked in that video, redeployed it with an attempt to get more power out of it. It didn't really work for a complex set of reasons. The motions improved, but we didn't see the power performance and that's a power takeoff issue. But more exciting than that, I think, is the project we did where we redeployed the lifesaver wave energy device, which is a ring-shaped, donut-shaped device. That's why they call it the lifesaver, right? It looks like a lifesaver, there you go. Yeah, when we deployed it the first time, nothing was done with the power, it was just burned off in a load bank. But for the second deployment, we used that power, the power and instrumentation suite and an undersea charging capability that you can use for charging autonomous vehicles under water, which was a very cool demonstration, a first in the world, as far as we know, of using wave power directly for something like that. So that means you're like a little torpedo-like underwater vehicle can slide in, hook up some way, interface with the power supply and recharge this battery and then go off and do another mission. That's the idea. It swims in and it docks and it downloads whatever data it's been collecting, gets charged up, goes back. That's real James Bond stuff. That's really great. Pretty cool. We didn't actually do the demo with the AUV, but that's kind of the next step. We just demonstrated the capability to do that. The other big thing we've been working on here for the last two years is kind of a complete redesign of the moorings, the deep-earth moorings at wet. There's three bursts, the two deep ones had a lot of issues. So for the general public, what does mooring mean? The mooring is the system of three legs of chain up to surface floats, which the wave energy converter developers, oh, I see a slide has been brought up. Yeah, I don't know. This is an example of a mooring system. This is the lifesaver ring-shaped device I mentioned. So I'll talk to this slide since it's up. Basically, you've got those Hauser lines, the ones that kind of go out to the sides to those little subsurface floats down to an anchor at the seabed. That keeps the thing in place, in the case of a storm, when the failure of the main mooring system, which are the vertical lines down to rock bolts into the seabed, those are what actually hold the device in place but also drive the power takeoff mechanisms on the deck of the device and generate power, winching in and out. But we also have mooring systems at the deep bursts. This is what's shown here is the shallow berth. So I'm not sure the sequence of the slides here, but if you can advance it by one. Okay, well, I'm changing the course a little bit just based on the way the slides are here. So I'll just focus on the tagline there at the bottom in yellow. This was the power production during that second deployment in the lifesaver that I mentioned. And the takeaway is that we were able to power that instrumentation suite 84% of the time so that it could do its job. If you tried to do that on batteries alone, you'd get less than 1%. Less than 1%? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So we're getting to where we can almost power a system like that. It doesn't have a huge power draw. Right. That's kind of the way wave energy has gone is everybody's focused on making lots of power to feed onto power grids. But there's more of a realization that, hey, if you can just make power out at sea where others can't, even if it's only a few kilowatts or even a few hundred watts, it could be very useful to a wide range of systems. Let me chime in a little bit with some thoughts about number one, with all the waves we have here and why we have plenty of waves, I don't have to give you supporting information about that. We know we have plenty of waves. We had the movie that showed them, too. Yes. We don't have a single wave action, working wave action, device that's actually generating power right now. At the moment, no, because those first two devices have been recovered, those demonstrations are complete, but we have more coming. Okay. But they're all R&D. Second is the thing about the mooring. The mooring. I mean, if we had a tsunami or some heavy wave action at some point, for whatever reason, is that mooring going to be able to hold the thing in place? Because you can imagine the forces are huge in a tsunami or a big wave and the thing gets in the wrong place and the wave carries the device away from the mooring, you know, no chain's gonna be strong enough to keep it in place, am I right? No. No. No. No. Actually, in the case of a tsunami, the wavelength is so long that all you'd see at the depth of wet is a gentle rise and fall. Where that becomes a problem is on the beach, where it shoals up and breaks. But what we do worry about are what we call 100-year storms. So we're designing for that worst case, we hope, storm. And so these moorings are designed to withstand the forces that those, that they will encounter during a 100-year storm. Though they are very beefy. Is it their elastic or just strong or a combination of that? Wrong. We're talking heavy-duty steel and I have some pictures that- We have pictures of the mooring. Okay, so the next question that comes to mind is something that you said that the chain has something to do with the generation of the power. I think we should explain to people how this device actually generates the power. Assume a wave that goes up and down and assume a chain that holds the device at a certain fixed distance from the bottom. How does that actually wind up generating power? Well, the one that we showed the picture of, so the answer to your question, how do these things work, how do they make power is different for every one of them so far. That's where wave energy is. Very early stage R&D, lots of very different ideas about how best to generate power. In some cases, it is the mooring itself that is a critical piece of that. So with the lifesaver, yeah, a taut connection to the seabed, the thing rocks around on the seabed and it drives a winch back and forth and that motion is a direct drive power taker. It generates an axle in there somewhere which keeps going in the same direction. So the cantilever turns a winch that keeps going clockwise or counterclockwise and that will generate like a generator inside the device. In that case, there are three generators. Two generators. And that is generating some power. Is there electronics before you offload that power onto a cable onto the shore or does it go directly onto the shore as I guess it would be direct current? Well, the Azura device, which was the one from the video, did send DC to shore where it was inverted on shore and conditioned for the grid. Others for the most part are going to do that power conditioning offshore on their device before sending it to shore. So they want to send grid quality power. So you have a frequency. You're generating power at a certain frequency. Like 60, what is it? 60 cycles per second, yeah. So now one thing, I'll get off this in a minute. Okay, I hope you do because we have a break almost now. Okay, now, we have a break now. Yeah, we can do the break now. Let me make my next question a cliffhanger. I'll just tell you what it is. Okay, and we'll think about it. You know, we have heard that there's a number of different kinds of these devices that are possible. We've seen pictures of just one of them and they have different technologies. And my question is going to be, which one do you like? Now let's take a break. Okay, he's left us with this cliffhanger question. So we're going to take a break right now. We're going to think about it behind the scenes. We have a whole minute to figure this out and we'll be back in one minute. Hello, I'm Mufi Hanuman. I want to tell you about a great show that appears on Think Tech Hawaii. It's all about tourism. In fact, we call it Tourism 101 where we talk about the issues and challenges that faces our number one industry throughout the state. We'll have some interesting guests, very informative dialogue and allow you an opportunity to maybe learn a little bit more by why this industry is so important for our state. It's been great for us in the past. We need it today and especially going forward. That's Tourism 101 on Think Tech Hawaii. Mahalo. Aloha, my name is Victoria and I'm a host at The Adventures in Small Business. This is a collaboration between US Small Business Administration, Hawaii District Office, and its partners where we showcase the stories of local entrepreneurs and small businesses, talk about how to start a business, talk about great tips for small business owners. Please join us every Thursday, 11 a.m. Think Tech Hawaii. Can you say Mahalo? Well, welcome back to Hawaii, the state of clean energy. And Jay left us with this cliffhanger question. We cogitated about it for a whole minute and Pat has informed me that he has an answer. Well, let me rephrase it or re-state it so they can clear what we're asking. There's lots of different kinds of technologies. These technologies have been, I want to say in play, but they have been in research, in process, in design for about 10 or 15 years, at least. I'm sure you can give us some historical notion of where it all began, probably in the year 1215, yeah? But most recently, there have been at least half a dozen of them that I can think of, which would generate electricity out at sea. And for various reasons, they all have their pros and cons. So now you've done research on this type with, I don't know how you distinguish it, the cantilever kind, with the inside generator and all that. Why do you like that one? Is that your favorite one? Or are there other models you're working with that may actually be better? Well, I'm gonna cop out to some extent by saying that I personally don't have a favorite design yet. However, so what we've tested, those two devices, they've each gone through two iterations, they're both called point absorbers, which means they're just a buoy in the water and they move around and then different people have different ideas about how to take that motion, turn it into electrical generation. The next one coming is one of the more promising concepts. And this is the big boy that we've been talking about. It's called an oscillating water column. So it's basically a huge chamber of air. It's a man-made blowhole. The Halona blowhole only floats so it forces the waves force air through a turbine, just a regular air turbine, it's a 500 kilowatt turbine. So this thing at least has the potential to generate some significant power. So OWCs as we call them, oscillating water columns are one of the more encouraging concepts. But there's another concept called an oscillating surge wave converter, a big flap that's typically deployed in the near shore waters where the waves tend to come at them more and that's a different type of generation. You can pressurize water or drive hydraulics. So there's a lot of good ideas out there. So what we do with Pat, we could call it the big flap about the big flap. Yeah. What do you think? We can talk about flaps. Get your flaps down. Ooh, yeah. So maybe that was, I think it was slide six. Yeah, so this gets to kind of wrapping up the mooring discussion. This gives you a little taste of what some of this mooring hardware in the redesign looks like. So if you start on the bottom left of that picture, you have the big anchors. Those are 10 ton dragon bedman anchors out on a sandy bottom connected to two and three quarter inch chain which is what the whole system was before but it became apparent that that's not big enough. So we now have those things called H-links that connect that existing chain to four inch chain which is shown on the right. This stuff's massive. I mean, it's hundreds of pounds per link. And you see what some of the hardware across the top to make it all connect together. It looks like it can necessarily get good scale on that but trust me, no guys are picking those things up. Well, you have the ladder beside there and you can see where the size of the link is like a by a foot almost. Well, yeah, in the top left is the surface float, the new surface float with the hardware hanging beneath it. And that float is 4.2 meters in diameter. That's about 14 feet in diameter. It's a huge float. That gives you a taste of what those shackles and links look like. So that chain was not cheap either, was it? So what's kind of a rough order of magnitude cost? Are you willing to say or? Well, we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars to just to procure the chain for three legs or one more. Well, it was not cheap. Is it worth it, what I mean is this is an expensive proposition to test out these bigger and bigger devices. And you have inherent, what do I call it, challenges. Number one comes to mind is it's steel and steel rusts. In fact, everything corrodes at sea and the combination of elements in the sea. Maybe, and those are changing maybe with climate change. So, as the years go by, these things are going to corrode. And so they have a useful life of X, whatever that is. Maybe that's part of your research. The other thing is it does affect in Hawaii, it's gonna affect the navigation. You have to put them out there in the ocean, deploy them in a certain place and there will be the inevitable fisherman who comes by or who knows what kind of boats are out there. And they might run into these chains or into these devices and have a really bad day at sea. And the question is, that's a challenge. Call it a political challenge, call it a traffic challenge. Is it worth it, are we going in the right direction with this kind of energy generation system? Well, I think so, you know, partly because I, you know, it's what I do for a living, but I'm sorry, I'm sorry for that question. No, but I, you know, these are very real questions. If there's a commercial future for wave energy, then you're deploying these types of large machines in significant numbers and you have cables to shore and you have mooring systems. And yeah, you're a user of the ocean and you need to get along well with the other users of the ocean. Tourism in our case is important, fishing, cultural sensitivities, it's all there and we can't ignore any of it. But the resource is just so vast that it's almost, it wouldn't be a response to not to pursue it. It could run all the way, it could run all the way. And it wouldn't have any effect on the ocean. It would just generate this enormous amount of completely green energy. It would, it would be fabulous. But there, you know, there would be impact. And it's as a society, you have to decide whether you are willing to take, take those trade-offs. But yeah, compared to some other generation, it's relatively clean green, you know. But. Also attracts fish, I mean, it becomes such a big time fish aggregation devices, these things are. So as far as the moorings and their strength in their life, it's not so much the corrosion. There is a corrosion factor we allow for a certain amount per year. But that'll last decades. What you worry about is the fatigue on the different elements and the ultimate strength as we talked about before. We've designed a system that, as a minimum 10 year design life, we hope for considerably more than that. And we inspect on a regular basis. And also they wear the links when they're bobbing up and down. They wear, the studs can get knocked out. Yeah, so we have the whole system now with the intention, even when there's no wave energy converter, to partly address that, because we didn't before. You know, I'm reminded of the whole affair with telecommunications cables. They come from far away. They're at the bottom of the ocean. They have to get ashore in order to live a signal. We don't talk about exactly where they are because then there would be those people who would like to do malicious mischief on them. And so they have their, you know, you wouldn't find it so easily on a chart. Exactly where the cable is coming ashore. Furthermore, you know, even if we did know where they're coming ashore, it would be, it would be, it would be with sucking up some beach or some, you know, some shoreline. And so- I think they bore in under the beach though. Yeah, they must, they can't be visible. No, no, they go in well under the shoreline and come up. So you have the same issue, don't you? I mean, out of these devices, inevitably, whether it's processed into 60 cycles out there or not, whether it's direct or alternating current, you have to have a cable that doesn't corrode very much and that drops down to the bottom, comes whatever distance it is. And I guess it can be a fair distance. And then somewhere along the line, it has to come ashore. Maybe like a telecommunications scale. Yeah, right. And it has to come ashore in a way so that it doesn't suck up, you know, the geography in the beach. And it also doesn't act as a malicious, not a malicious, an attractive nuisance, right? To people who, you know, may want to do malicious mischief. So have you addressed that or is this something in the future? Well, we have an advantage at the test site in that it's, that shore entry point is on the Marine Corps base. So it's, and it's a pretty remote part of the Marine Corps base. So it does, most people don't know what's there. We worry more about the wave action on the sand carrying the cable apart and not people. But if you had it in, where near Waikiki or Alamwana, yeah, people would mess with it, you know. It's probably going to allow wave energy boys off of Waikiki anyway. Perhaps not, yeah. One other thing comes to mind from what you say is we live in a world of climate change. We live in a world of sea level rise. We live in a world of, what do I call it, shifting sands. I don't mean political shifting sands. I mean real shifting sands. Yeah, okay, yeah. And so the sea bottom, the sea floor, where you're dropping the anchor, so to speak, as well as the sea floor under the cable or with the cable, where the cable comes up onto the land, they're going to shift maybe more than before because of climate change. And the shore itself, the beach, that's going to shift. And you're going to have changes. And maybe good, maybe bad. So the question is, if you want to have these things last for 10 years in a cycle or 20 or 30, how can you cope with what we know is going to happen to the ocean floor and the beach in terms of climate change and sea level rise? I think we're probably assuming that those sorts of changes are slow enough that we can adapt to them kind of on the fly. That's not a very good answer, but it's hard to predict that far out ahead what the beach will look like and what the wave action will look like, although we are doing modeling along those lines at the university. So, but you're right, you always have to look ahead. Well, did you want to finish with the big boy? Oh, yes, yeah. We don't understand how we need to get it right now. Show slide eight and nine real quick. So this is the big boy that Mitch talked about that's coming next. This thing's huge. It weighs 1,000 tons. That's it under construction in a shipyard in Portland. Look at the size of the cars. These are the cars, yeah. Show the next pictures of it. How tall is it? Must be a hundred feet or something. It's 37 meters in length and it's about, I forget, 20-some meters in overall height. So it's huge and it has the potential to make, as I said, 500 kilowatts with its turbine that's up in that top part. Well, on that happy note, with the big boy, going for shore of the week, we have to wrap up. How far offshore does the big boy go to be affected? Well, in this case, it'll be deployed where we have a berth for it, which is at our 60 meter test berth, which is about a kilometer and a half offshore. Ah, sounds right, yeah, yeah. That wouldn't be a big problem. Sorry. I just have to ask about it. Well, I've got to wrap it up. Otherwise, the CEO of Think Tech Hawaii is going to be all over my case and he won't invite me back. He'll look down. So that's it, everybody. Thank you very much, Pat, for coming out at short notice again. And that's your, this is Hawaii, the state of clean energy, and we're winding up and we'll be back next Wednesday before you know it in a flash of an eye. So, aloha, everyone.