 Hawaii, the state of clean energy, here at 4 o'clock on a given Wednesday, Ray Starling is my co-host. Hi, Ray. Hi, Jay. How are you? Pat Cross is the energy program manager of Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, H-N-E-I. And we're going to talk today about connecting wave energy with Pat Cross, wait a minute. No, the full title is New Innovative Devices, Innovative Devices for Connecting Wave Energy, comma, with Pat Cross. So, Keska say, you know, wave energy. I remember, okay, back in the day, this has to be 2002 or 2003, maybe. It was even before the Renewable Energy Initiative, and I was a party at Aloha Tower, and I ran to a guy, it was a tech guy from California, and he was telling me they had these devices, and you anchored them to the ground, to the undersea bottom, and then they floated on the top and they were buoyant, and as the wave, you know, moved, it would generate electrical current. It was a little generator inside, a little pod, and then through a cable it would feed the current, you know, back to the shore. And he was working on this. I said, that's just great, I was so impressed, that's a fabulous idea, what a great idea. Why don't you do that everywhere? He said, well, they corrode, and we haven't been able to deal with the corrosion just yet. And that was, what, 15 years ago. Anything changed, Pat? Well, a lot more things have corroded. Okay. So, you're working with wave energy. Yes. What's the state of wave energy in Hawaii? Well, the state of wave energy in Hawaii is that we are, we have reinvigorated the testing of these kinds of concepts like that, these wave energy conversion devices, through the fact that the Navy has now installed the infrastructure for a three birth test bed off the Marine Corps base in Kanoi. So we now have those in place, three test birds, all cable to shore, as you say. We have two devices that are in the water now being tested, and they are experiencing some successes and some failures, and we're learning from them, and we're looking forward to sort of the next generation of wave energy devices that are coming starting in 2017, and a few have been identified beyond. So we're really just getting going with these first two smaller scale prototype devices, learning a lot from those, but there's a long way to go, and yes, corrosion is still a challenge, and yes, just survivability in the difficult ocean environment is still a challenge. That's why wave energy still has a long way to go, but there's kind of a renewed push globally. Why is there a renewed push? There's more and more of a recognition that the resource is enormous. It's, I mean, it's all over the world in varying degrees, for sure. Some areas have very energetic ocean wave environments, others less so, but there may be potential for economically viable wave energy electrical production in a wide range of wave regimes. So the global potential with so much of our population in the world close to coastlines is enormous, so the prize is big, but the challenges are big too, so that's why we're not there yet. I think it's an important point that you can't do wave energy in Omaha. No, it's hard. You might find a lake and get a little something. The other thing you mentioned, it just sets up my Woody Allen way of looking at things, is that suppose we got these devices and we put them in every square inch of coastline everywhere in the world, millions and millions and millions of them, and they're all drawing from wave energy, you think the ocean would go flat? In other words, it would use up all the wave energy and then everything would kind of stop, get clutched. There'd be no more coastal erosion. No more. That's impossible. It's really unlimited, isn't it? It is essentially unlimited. Certainly if you had an array of a large number of devices off coastline, you would have, and we haven't gotten there, so we can't really measure that effect yet, but we can model it, and you would begin to have some effect on the wave regime that's arriving at the shoreline, particularly if that wave array is fairly close to the shoreline. But so far, that's all a long way off, and that's part of the environmental consideration that will need to take place as you move forward and you begin to demonstrate the viability of individual devices, then you can start talking about deploying large numbers of them, and that's when you'll need to study those kinds of effects and see if there are detrimental impacts of deploying them in numbers. You said close to shore, and I think that's been sort of an operative assumption here, but Al Yee, the engineer who deals in floating concrete and is working with Otec off Adira, Sierra, Garcia, Diego Garcia, and elsewhere, I think he's also the front one in Okinawa. Of course, a lot of money, but the idea is it's a platform and it's removed from land and it generates hydrogen, that's the product you get from this platform, and the hydrogen of course is fungible and sort of a byproduct is that it's storable. So suppose I take your model that you've been describing with, you know, the problems of, you know, what's the word, of rust and corrosion and all that, and I build that in, but then I make a large and expensive concrete floating platform, and I put lots of these things around the platform and they generate hydrogen, and then I, you know, somebody stops by every now and then picks up the hydrogen, which is good everywhere in the world, theoretically, including Omaha. Isn't that really the future instead of limiting it to the coastline? That's a future. I mean, there are plenty of people who are exploring those sorts of offshore energy generation. I mean, you could have wind and solar and wave. Right, the whole enchilada. And OTEC all working together to create energy offshore, far from land. And yes, hydrogen fueling station, an electrical recharge station, whatever you might want to do with it. Those are interesting concepts and those very well might be earlier niche markets for wave energy. But for the most part, I mean, all the testing we're doing to date has been close to shore. Certainly all the grid connected testing, and I should point out that this test site we have here is grid connected. It's the only one in the country like it, and by definition it's close to shore. And so it's aimed at demonstrating or exploring the viability of wave energy devices in terms of their potential to feed power into a power grid. Nearby. But yes, there are myriad other potential applications of wave power. On a much smaller scale, you could use wave power and people do, at least in an exploratory way, to generate power for an offshore buoy, say, that measures meteorological conditions or that sort of thing. There may be, and the Navy has interest in offshore power generation for autonomous vehicles and that sort of thing. So there may be offshore applications of wave energy for sure. But most of the emphasis to date really has been on the eventuality of grid connected wave. So how far has the science advanced? I mean, it's been well over 10 years since my conversation with that guy at Aloha Tower. And I mean, I thought from a mechanical point of view, he had a workable product or just maybe a material science issue there. But what has been done? Who is working on what to make these things closer to productive? Lots of people are working on it. There's been a big emphasis in the United Kingdom, especially in Scotland. Really the fathers of the modern push to wave energy, I guess you could say, is the European Marine Energy Center, which was initially federally funded within the U.K. and is now operating under its own steam. It's challenged to do so. Steam is kind of an interesting word. Yeah, I shouldn't say steam, operating under its own wave power. So that's a test site, not unlike the one we have here in much more energetic waters off of the Orkney Islands in Scotland. So they were testing devices that were being developed by mostly U.K. companies, a well-known company in this business is called Palamis. Another one is Aquamarine. Both of those devices, which look nothing like each other and work nothing like each other, had some varying degrees of success and iterations and improvements. And then, ultimately, at the end of 2015, or was it 2014, both companies went out of business, basically. Lack of funding? Lack of funding, you know. They weren't in the profit mode yet anyway, right? No, they weren't in a profit mode. They were getting a regular government investment and some private investment and to keep their technology moving forward, but ultimately that kind of ran out. Governments changed, they went out of business. So there have been some sort of high-profile failures in the last couple of years. And the one you mentioned was from Maui, it was an Australian company that took it away back from Australia and it sank. Yeah, they tested it on the off-the-south side of Australia, ocean links. Ocean links. And yeah, so that's another company that's out of business. So there were some failures. Where have the advances been made? Is it in material science? Is it in the engineering of the design of the pod, so to speak, or the cabling? Or, I don't know, where? Where have they been spending their time improving the engineering of these things? The answer would be different for different companies. Some are really emphasizing some things that were overlooked in early planning, such as mooring systems and serviceability. So I think people are learning from some of those past failures and they are factoring those into their designs. But it's been a slow-moving push without enough government investment, perhaps. But it's encouraging now in that, well, a few things. One is that we have this test site in the U.S., the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Navy have gotten interested in the form of sending funds toward wave energy. And so there are some really interesting and innovative concepts that are in development now, slated to test here in Hawaii. So there's kind of renewed reason for optimism. And people are hopefully coming up with some smart ways to deal with things like corrosion and just durability at sea. Ray, before we go to the break, you had a question beforehand I thought was really important. Well, I was just wondering, in terms of the money that the government here in the United States is putting towards this, is it pretty much your part of the process, the H&EI sort of sponsoring these places where people can come and test their units? Or are you involved in actually putting money into the units themselves? More of the former, although not quite. Our role, and thank you for asking, and I need to clarify that. So it's the Navy's site. They're the ones who put the infrastructure in place, the cables, the moorings. But those same two entities that are involved in funding companies to come test with that infrastructure, Department of Energy and U.S. Navy, Naval Facilities, Engineering Command, NAVFAC, those same two entities are funding us to support the testing in the form of performance monitoring, both power performance and survivability, durability of devices, but also environmental data collection, such as collecting acoustic data and doing ecological dives and looking at how things might be evolving around the devices. And then logistics support. So we have a subcontract with the Honolulu company, AC Engineering, to outfit a dedicated vessel to support all this stuff, all the testing of devices, the deployment of our environmental gear, all that. So that's our role. When we come back, I'm going to ask you, if Jay and I had a device we wanted to test, how would we go about trying to get connected out there at Kanyoi? Wow, that's a cliffhanger. They'll all come back. Aloha. My name is Carl Campania, and I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers, and Reformers, the Politics in Hawaii series. Join us each week as we have, guest after guest, talking about the policy and the politics of our state, of our islands, and of what really matters to each of us. So please join us each week and engage in that conversation. Mahala. Hello, and aloha. My name is Raya Salter, and I am the host of Power of Hawaii, where Hawaii comes together to figure out how we're going to work towards a clean and renewable energy future. We have exciting conversations with all kinds of stakeholders, everyone who needs to come together to talk about renewable energy, be they engineers, advocates, lawyers, utility executives, musicians, or artists, to see how we can come together to make a renewable future. Tuesdays at 1 PM. 978, Bingo, we're back. Ray, Ray Starling, my co-host, you have these fabulous questions, these questions that find the meaning of life or the meaning of energy anyway. And we left with the cliffhanger. And I wonder if you can repeat that, because some people may not remember what the cliffhanger was. Jay and I often have a drink together, and we talk about things that we might want to do. And let's say we had a device that we wanted to get tested to see if we could wave into energy out somewhere out in the ocean. And you guys are sponsoring these three sites where you say the Navy is, and you guys are operating it for them. What would we have to do to sort of get in line or try to compete for that? Because it looks like that that's a great place because you need active in the ocean testing before you can say we've got this thing linked. Yes, open ocean testing is a critical step before you can advertise that you're ready to go commercial. And so that's what the test site can provide. It's way pre-commercial still at this stage. But anyway, to answer your question, how would you come? If you have an idea, it's got to reach a certain level of maturity before you're going to draw the attention of the Navy or the Department of Energy to obtain funding. So all of the companies that have been selected so far to come test at WETS have gone through a competitive funding competition. They've written proposals to either DOE or Navy to do the testing. So if a very well-funded entity had a concept that had reached a level of maturity where it made sense to test at WETS, and they didn't need the Navy or the Department of Energy Support funding, then that hasn't come up yet. But it would be given that it's the Navy's site and the Navy holds the environmental assessment and they would still have to go through the Navy to utilize the Navy's test infrastructure. And to be honest, I'm not even sure if that's legally possible. But the short answer is keep your eyes open for the next Department of Energy or Navy funding opportunity related to Wave Energy and develop your concept and aim it toward testing at WETS. Yeah, is it going to, sorry, go ahead, Ray. Well, I was wondering, sort of, you've seen a few of these come and go. Do you have sort of an image of what it's likely to look like out there? Is it going to be something that's bobbing on the surface? Is it going to be something like the Wave Gen where the water comes in and pushes air through a turbine and that sort of thing? Is there something that seems to be working better than other types of technologies? Unfortunately, I think this is an unsatisfying answer, but it's too early to say. It's, we really just have these first two devices that are sitting here. Oh, can we talk about them? Sure, yeah. One looks like it could be useful in the French Revolution, 1789, I think it was. The guillotine, there it is. The fars could be watching, you see. Whoa. Right. Actually, I've seen these offshore. Yes, you have. These are the two devices that are offshore now at the test site. So this guy, this is from Northwest Energy Innovations, went in the water in the first of June last year, 2015, so a year and a half in the water. How tall is it, really? It's about 50 feet tall, about the top 12 feet or so, stick out of the water. So it just has this float that rests on the surface of the water and rocks back and forth and generates electricity through a hydraulic system inside. Whereas this one works completely differently. It's got, it's called the Lifesaver. It's from a Norwegian company. Through the prime contract is an American company called Sound and Sea Technologies, but the Norwegian company called Fred Olsen that developed this concept. And each of these power takeoffs, there are three of them as shown here, and this is the configuration that's in the water now. Each one of them contains a winch, which is taught, connected to anchors at the bottom. So as the thing rocks in the waves, those winch in and out, and so it's a direct drive. There's no hydraulics involved. It's a direct drive power generation. So those are, both of those devices are called point absorbers, which are like you're talking about. How big is that one, of course. You know, these are very similar scale. This is about 50 feet across. So these are actually roughly two correct scale. Yeah, is this just trying to test different technologies at the same time? Or is it, is it? No, there it is, Ray. I think, I think there's a photo. Good, you're able to bring that up. That's how it looks in the water. So it's about 16 meters across in diameter. And no, there's, it's just one technology. So the same guts are in each of those power takeoffs. It can house as many as five. They went with three for this test. And then all the electronics are in this water type enclosure here. So they're both point absorbers. They're both buoys that float on the surface and move around and convert motion into electrical generation. That's what they have in common. And then the next device is more like what you're talking about. The next device that we look forward to seeing from an Irish company called Ocean Energy is an oscillating water column. So it's, it's an air chamber where the waves force that air through a turbine, an air turbine, to generate electricity. And the scale of this is much larger. Like these are, these are 40, 50 ton devices. Like this is gonna, the next one's gonna be more like 650 tons. And a lot more power production potentially. You know, hasn't been demonstrated yet, but they've tested it at quarter scale in Ireland. So, that's a completely different concept. I mean, you know, to power generation. And we just don't know what the winners are gonna look like yet. And you're gonna be looking for longevity, corrosion issues. You'll be looking for how efficient it is. The return on investment for, you know, a certain amount invested. Right. I mean, I mentioned the Palamas earlier, the Scottish device that really demonstrates some very good power production. But it just, it couldn't demonstrate long term survivability. They had to keep bringing it in and doing things to it. And that was expensive. Yeah. We have a few more photos we can look at to try to get more detail. Yeah. Yeah. This is basically the layout of the site with the three test births at the three different water depths. And some of the photos there around the corners. I'll give you some idea of that. There's a, at the two deep births, there are three of those floats as depicted in the upper left picture. And there's three anchors for each test, for each deep birth that look like the upper right photograph. Big, big heavy Bruce anchors, drag embedment anchors. And then our shore site is actually a converted or renovated, not converted really, but World War II bunker on the Marine Corps base. So we have some office space and the grid tie that takes place in that building. Question just popped in. And have you ever had a situation where a storm of such magnitude or wave of such magnitude was projected to hit here, where you've had to go out and take these things into port to make sure that they didn't rip apart? Not yet. Have you had any that have actually been pulled off by too much power in the wave? Not yet, unfortunately, no, that hasn't happened. I mean, when these guys design these devices, they're designing for 100 year storm kind of conditions. So they're trying, and that's one of the design challenges is designing something that can survive that 100 year storm, but also efficiently produce power all the rest of the time. So I think all these developers would say, no, they don't want to come in when the big storm comes. Some people are looking at methods to submerge the device below the roughest condition, or possibly some others may be designing systems that are easy to recover, to bring ashore if a really big hurricane or something is coming. But most people are just designing a system that they feel can survive for those kinds of conditions. Because that's a moving target in the sense that we have climate change storms coming. I don't want to say soon, but it may be soon. And if we invest, I mean, one of those things must cost a fair amount of money and the bigger ones will cost more. And you put it out there and A, there's a tsunami that would just throw it up on the beach as you suggested, right? But B, a good swell, take it apart. And that'd be the end of that. And you effectively, it'd be a total loss, really, if that kind of thing happened. Because if it got off its moorings, ho-ho, it would crash somewhere, so that'd be the end of it. That'd be a problem. And if you had a city, for example, or a base for that matter relying on a continual flow of power off this, it could be disappointed any day because of a big storm, yeah. Yeah, you've got to survive storms. And if there are some high-profile failures to do so, like that, that would be a setback for the whole push towards it. Before we go to our summary, Ray is ready to give a summary here. Just one other thing, Trump, you've heard that name recently. Vagley's on a hotel, I think. How is President-elect Trump, do you think, going to affect the Navy's initiative on this? Well, it's a good question. You can't avoid politics these days, can you? No. No, I mean, obviously the gut reaction to a Trump victory is not one of encouragement for renewables. However, there are plenty of good people around who will continue to try to push the development. And maybe the emphasis is more on the business opportunity and less on climate change, for example. But the push will still be there. Very interesting point, Pat. Yeah, I mean, it's, oh, and you mentioned Navy funding. I mean, maybe we're in the future, in the near future, going to get more of our funding through that DOD avenue rather than DOE. Yeah, another interesting point. We'll see. That's my summary. OK, Ray. OK, well, obviously, we're right in the middle of some good questions. And I think we need to have Pat back as frequently as we can get him, just to continue the conversation. Because I've got a lot of other questions that I'd like to ask. First of all, before we go, when you come back, talk to us about what you think you've got locked down pretty well in terms of what it takes to get this going. I take it that the cables and the electricity, bringing the electricity in from the site is pretty much done. I mean, you don't have that much trouble doing it, right? And it's just a matter of transferring that movement into electricity. But when you come back, let's talk a little bit about that. What's already ready to go, and what are the things that we still need to work on? So when you come back, because I think wave energy is a big deal, I think it could really help, certainly, for our islands. And I'd love to see it go. So you're right at the end of it. We're at the pointy end of this pier, as we used to say in the Navy, so we're the only place in the country where these things are going in the water. And that's fun, it's neat to be involved. So good. And unless we forget it's an unlimited supply of energy out there, we just find a way to tap into it. And the sun keeps making more of it. That's Pat Cross, energy program manager at Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, and Ray Starling. We're talking about new innovative devices for connecting wave energy with Pat Cross. It's all connected. Thank you, Pat. Thank you. Thank you.