The U.S. Energy Department has announced $10 million to test prototypes designed to generate clean, renewable electricity from ocean waves and help diversify America’s energy portfolio.
The Energy Department-supported demonstrations at the U.S. Navy’s wave energy test site off Hawaii’s island of Oahu will help develop reliable wave energy options and collect important performance and cost data for wave energy conversion (WEC) devices.
The Energy Department plans to test two WEC devices at depths of 60 and 80 meters at the open-water site offshore from Marine Corps Base Hawaii in Kaneohe Bay. These projects will enable the Energy Department to evaluate technology performance, reliability and cost of energy to achieve cost-competitive wave energy deployments in the future.
The two-phase demonstration projects will focus on WEC devices in the late stages of technology development–those ready to be tested at close to full-scale in the open-ocean environment. The first phase of this funding opportunity will optimize designs and plan for the deployment and testing of WEC systems. The second phase will support permitting, fabrication, deployment, retrieval, and decommissioning of these systems after 12 months of testing and data collection.
Press Release, April 29, 2014; Image: flickr