 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community Matters here. My name is Mitch Yuan and welcome to our show Hawaii, The State of Clean Energy. I have the privilege of standing in for Maria Tomei who's the regular senior host and I'm usually the junior host on this program. So I'm jumping in at the deep end of the pool. So please bear with me. So today we'll be talking about wave energy. And if we've been driving around the streets of Honolulu the last few months, we've seen a lot of waving. So I'll let you off the hook. This was our little joke that we put together before we started the show. We're going to talk about wave energy in the ocean. And I'd like to welcome our guest, Dr. Pat Cross from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute who is the Wave Energy Test Site program manager. So Pat, welcome to the show. Good to be here. So I'm still going to do my opening monologue here. One of the things we want to do is to highlight UH and H&EI technology because I don't think the general public understands or has good insight into what we are doing to try to solve problems that we have for society in general. And the university has very active programs and some of our guests that will be appearing here have been supporting new technologies to solve our problems and in this case it's energy and how we can capture energy from waves. So that's the end of my opening monologue. So Pat, first of all, how about giving us a little bit of background, your background before you came to H&EI? Sure. I was a career US Navy officer, submarine or oceanographer. Finished my last tour in the Navy was as the oceanographer for the submarine force here at Pearl Harbor. Right. And after that I worked for a small company doing mostly Navy funded underwater acoustics and autonomous vehicles and then had this opportunity to step into H&EI and run our efforts in wave energy. So how long have you been with us at H&EI, Pat? Five years. Five long years. Five long years. Well they go by quickly, don't they? And sort of generally before we get into this subject area, what kinds of projects generally have you been doing? Well what we're going to talk about today has definitely been the lion's share of my focus the whole five years. Really focused on supporting the Navy's wave energy test site. I've dabbled in a few other things relating to OTEC, ocean thermal energy, sea water air conditioning, worked for a little while in support of some photovoltaic research. But primarily it's been this wave energy focus and specifically focusing on supporting the Navy. So I know a little bit about Pat's projects, so they're really cool projects actually and the one we're going to talk to you about is UberCool. And so to start it off and show you, give you an impression so that we're just not talking heads up here, H&EI funded a short video produced by Royer Studios out of LA. It's professionally done. So can we roll our wave energy video please? 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, O'ahu 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. One 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. Okay, I hope you all enjoyed that video and one of the things that struck me looking at it was the actual size of these buoys. And so, Pat, how about talking a little bit about the size of these kinds of buoys and what it takes to build them and move them and all that kind of stuff? Yeah, so the one that was in the video was the Azura from Northwest Energy Innovations and that thing weighed about 45 tons and it's about 50 feet in length or height depending on when it's in the vertical doing its thing, it's about 50 feet. So that sounds big but we've actually got some coming down the pipe that are much larger than that. There's one coming in the spring of 19 from an Irish company that's more than 10 times the size of that. 10 times? Wow. That's like a small ship. 800 and some tons. It is. It is. Yeah. Like a small ship. Very good. So one other thing I wanted to talk about before we pull up your slide is can you talk about the permitting and the layers of permitting that are required to put in a test site like this here in Hawaii? Yeah. So this is a good time to emphasize that this site is a Navy site. So the infrastructure was put in place with Navy funds so the Navy had to pursue an environmental assessment, actually two of them for the two different parts of the site. And the one that established the two new deeper test berths took close to three years of exhaustive effort with NOAA and with local cultural concerns and with the Marine Corps base and just a lot of entities weighing in. And so it's a long and cumbersome process. The good news about all that is that the Navy has undertaken that and passed the test basically and therefore the site is permitted which allows these developers of wave energy machines to come in and deploy their devices with a much simpler permitting process to go through. So months instead of years of permitting. So this allows us to attract these businesses to Hawaii because we have a capability that they need, permittings largely in place as you say. So what kind of economic activity is this generating for Hawaii, you know, ballpark? Yeah, I don't know if I can throw out any numbers but certainly we're still in fairly early stages. I feel like I've got enough gray hairs where we're not in early stages but we're still in the pretty early going so we've only dealt with a couple of devices so far. But just in dealing with those two we've really engaged with a few partners. The moorings themselves were put into place by Healy Tibbets, a local company. Almost all of our at sea work is done by Sea Engineering, another Hawaii company. So we're definitely making some infusions into the local economy but so far still on a fairly small scale. So from the point of view of UH resources, I mean it's more than just H&EI. What kind of other departments did we call upon? Like in Sowest, like the weather people, the forecasting people, can you kind of give us an over top level view of that? Sure, yeah. There are others at UH who are involved, particularly in ORE, Ocean Resources Engineering, which is an academic department in which resides our wave forecaster. So this is a researcher who is incorporating high resolution winds which also come out of Sowest at UH. So that's a UH run forecast model for the winds and for the waves and it's a very important part of what we do at WETS. But we also collaborate on the engineering side with other researchers in ORE and in mechanical engineering to some extent over in the College of Engineering. So yeah, there are others involved at UH and we hope, we like the idea in the future of involving more and more people at UH. So this is really good for our young people, our young engineers coming up through the ranks to look at this kind of engineering and get the experience that they otherwise wouldn't get. I mean, I would think that this is really attractive to them and interesting. I think so. In fact, just this fall semester we're now using some of our Navy funds to support a master's student and a PhD student who were attracted to just that. These guys are doing cool stuff actually in the water rather than purely theoretical and so yeah, I think that has a cool factor to a lot of young folks. So we're going to be cutting to a break but before we do that, can you just give us some idea of the level of funding that this requires and where basically the funding is coming from? I just tallied it up and to date we have drawn in a little over $18 million of Navy funding. It's really congressional funding that's coming through the Navy through our applied research lab at the university. So that's the DOD side but DOE also invested a considerable chunk of money in the Department of Energy. Not the Department of Education but the Department of Energy made the substantial initial investment to establish HNEI as a support entity to the development of this test site. So that brings me to the question of how many other test sites are out there like this and is there competition in this area or are we all cooperating? Not really. I guess you could consider a competition on some level but there are very few test sites globally. The big one in the world is still EMAC which is the European Marine Energy Center in Scotland. They have been in existence the longest and have tested the most wave and tidal energy devices there. Our site is the only one in the US and there's one in the UK and I'm aware of efforts to establish test sites in Korea, in Japan and in Spain and France is looking at one. So there are others in various stages of development but so far we're one of the few shows in town for an actual grid connected place to test wave energy converters. So are we ready for a break now? Yes? Yep. Well let's go for it and then we'll change the venue. We have a nice slide that we'll talk to in the second half of the show. Thanks. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. If you're not in control of how you see yourself then who is? Live Above the Influence. Living in this crazy world, so caught up in the confusion, nothing is making sense. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host Martin Desbang we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live but other aspects of our life not only here in Hawaii but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. So welcome back to the second half. Rich, could you put up our one and only slide? We didn't want to kill everybody with death by PowerPoint so we have one slide that covers a lot of ground and I'm going to ask Pat to walk us through this slide. So starting at the whatever you want to say, just tell him where you want to be and then he can kind of zoom in on that part of the slide. Well, okay, sure. So this is a slide put together recently to just kind of capture everything about our work at the test site in one slide which of course is difficult to do but there's some highlights on here that basically in the upper left you have a little map that shows where the three test births are so that the test site consists of three births at 30, 60 and 80 meter water depth for testing different sizes of wave energy converters. Below that is a picture of the Azura which was shown in the video during its deployment and then below that is a photo of the lifesaver device which was the next in line so that one was deployed for about a year ending in April of 2017 but has stayed here in Hawaii as did the Azura so both of these devices actually have been deployed twice now so we learned some things in the first deployment and then got them back out there and I'll talk a little bit more about the lifesaver project in particular but we did some modifications to the Azura and redeployed it in an effort to improve its power performance and we have now deployed the lifesaver for its second time. The other the pictures of the boat there on the bottom of the screen right now are a vessel that our partners see engineering the local company I mentioned is outfitting we are we are funding them to outfit this as a dedicated vessel for the test site so that project is under underway and is actually nearing completion these pictures are a bit out of date but so that's being outfitted here in Hawaii so it's like I'll push the business side so that's business for our local shipyards yes yeah yeah that work is happening right in Honolulu so we still have some more pictures is that it I can talk to some of the other graphics on there if you're like well let's see at the top right the instrument there and the graph to its right kind of represent one of the bigger things we do in in terms of environmental monitoring which is which is acoustics so one of the permitting concerns about these things is do they make harmful sounds that could be damaging to marine mammals or fishes or other critters out there in the ocean so we collect acoustic data which to date with the two devices really has made the point that these things don't make a ton of noise so far we're well below any thresholds of concern but we'll continue to monitor that as larger devices with more power output come come along the graph with the bars there is just representing a another aspect of what we do to support the test site which is develop power matrices so so a wave energy converter unlike a wind turbine where you have a power curve with waves your power output it depends both on the period of the waves and the and the height of the waves so you have a power matrix and so that's we generate an independent power matrix for each device that gets deployed and I think that's probably good enough for the for the slide I just want to talk a little bit about the aggressive environment that these you know this equipment is deployed in I mean both you and I have a Navy background so we know what the sea does but let's talk a little bit about how well this heavy equipment stands up in the water the moorings and a little bit about corrosion and things like that is that I've given you three things to talk about well they all kind of come under the umbrella of it's really hard to work in the ocean but and it's really expensive to work in the ocean so yeah moorings that we've had we've had a number of problems and challenges to overcome already moorings of are one of them where we're spending a lot of our time right now rethinking some mooring systems but these it kind of illustrates where wave energy is now which is a long way from commercial viability and that that's you're really getting at the reasons why it's it's just expensive you've got a design a machine that can survive in storms but also operate efficiently in normal wave conditions and with stand corrosion and with stand biofouling and just it's a it's a it's a violent environment and keeping something that keeping something running in that environment and then when it does go down being able to service exactly that was my next greenly challenging because you have to send divers or remotely operated vehicles potentially any of those for you young guys out there that's really cool stuff I mean sending a remotely opera operated an ROV down there to check things out with cameras and all that kind of stuff and manipulating arms I mean that's really kind of fun technology to work on it is I didn't point it out on the slide but there was a picture of the ROV that that's the engineering has acquired also with our funds it's pretty state-of-the-art so I know our students in the engineering department at UH are doing a lot of work with robotics and underwater vehicles and all that kind of stuff you know I leave the office late at night and they're all out there all these kids are in the shop grinding away drilling building stuff I mean it's really nice to see that kind of enthusiasm and interest in these guys and then they put on their science their science shows in the courtyard and it's really fascinating to see the kinds of experiments or projects that they're working on so very good so kind of wrap up you brought a couple of models with you that I think will get into a little bit more depth with so if you like to go and talk about your models I brought a couple of show and tell items here basically but so I've already talked a little bit about the lifesaver and I wanted to emphasize a project so this has already been deployed for about a year at Wetz it operates by it has a top connection beneath each of these power takeoff mechanisms to the seabed it also has a secondary mooring system that keeps it on station so but as the thing tip it up a bit as the thing rocks on the waves direct drive winches there's basically winches in each of these that that winch in winch out and generate power that's how the device works in a nutshell so we're redeploying at this time to correct some issues that weren't done optimally the first time with the tautness of those connections they're a little bit too much play in them the first time and we had some issues with the hausers that held the thing in place so that caused some failures of those connect vertical connections so anyway we think we learned enough to make this a bit more reliable and a bit better in terms of power performance right the second time around but what's really cool is right here by this house the power for this particular device was just burned off in the first deployment we didn't do anything with it but now we've installed right here where there would be a fourth one of these power takeoffs it can host as many as five we've deployed a University of Washington sensor suite which has underwater cameras an acoustic camera sonar and and optical cameras treat with with strobe lights very sophisticated quite a software development behind it to make all those sensors work together and we also incorporated a sub-c inductive meaning wireless charging capability well how does that work so all this is lowered through the hull of the amp or sorry of the lifesaver the the system is called amp which is the adaptable monitoring package it's all lowered through the hull and sticks out and is sensing the ocean now as we speak so we just deployed this thing so we just redeployed the lifesaver with this feature and it is getting all of its power from the wave energy converter itself so we're not plugged into shore we're actually using wave power to do something of interest at sea and the subsea charging thing is of a lot of interest to a lot of people just that you mentioned autonomous vehicles and how do you get power to autonomous vehicles in general you don't you recover them and you charge their batteries and you put them back in so wouldn't it be cool if there was a mothership that they could go to and offload their data and charge up and that's so that's that's the root of that project i i'll just show this one briefly this is the one i mentioned from the irish company it's a wave energy converter that's coming to us in the spring and despite its small size irish spring irish spring good yes yes yeah that's your painted green and white despite the size you know they look comparable in size here i guess but this one is is huge right it's and it's called an oscillating water column so in this case the water surges in and the water line is about here mm-hmm and so this is all submerged and the waves surge in and out of these chambers forcing air through this air chamber out through a turbine here which is a 500 kilowatt turbine so just like the blow rock out on it is a man-made blowhole right blowhole yeah it is a halona blowhole only engineered to be efficient hopefully so that one is coming to us in the spring and we're very excited about it because it really represents a big step up in both size and power performance and there's a really good team behind it so that's coming soon okay so are we i think we're pretty close to wrapping up but do you have any final words like i have one little on my cheat sheet what's on the horizon so yeah well so i mentioned on the near horizon is this irish device but we have several other wave energy converters coming so there's a company called columbia power which is an american company which we may see by the early fall another american company called oscila power toward the end of the year and then two or three more behind them that are coming in 2020 and 2021 so we've got a number of wave energy converters coming right we've also got a big project to to redeploy our moorings and address some of the issues i mentioned that's also coming and then in the background kind of is ongoing power performance and acoustic monitoring and all that stuff so great yeah okay well pat thank you so much really appreciate it and to our audience out there especially you young engineers i hope this has given you some ideas of what you might be interested in doing with your career and helping hawaii become energy independent so with that i'd like to say aloha and we'll get back to waving yeah waving with great energy thank you