Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: August 21, 2024
Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: August 21, 2024
U.S. wave energy research achieves a world-first milestone!
The world’s first-ever grid-scale wave energy buoy is being tested off Oahu, an early milestone for what could one day become a major technology.
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Reasons For Hope
It’s hasn’t gotten much attention, but America just launched the world’s first grid-scale1 wave energy system! Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and developed by scrappy U.S./Irish startup Ocean Energy USA, the OE-35 wave power generation buoy was towed to a U.S. Navy test site off Oahu on July 19, 2024.
“Following over a decade and a half of design, trials, testing, and building, we are excited finally to be able to take this major step towards commercialization with our world-class OE-35 device.”
-Professor Tony Lewis, Ocean Energy.
OE-35 measures 125 by 59 feet, weighs 826 tons, and has an electricity-generating capacity of up to 1.25 megawatts. Interestingly, it doesn’t work by having waves directly turn a turbine like a hydroelectric dam, but by containing a pressurized air volume that’s closed off from the air but open to the sea at the bottom. Wave motion pushes the air to turn a turbine, like a little sea-powered high-pressure wind turbine. This structure allows its moving parts to be located far above the corrosive effects of saltwater, which has historically been a major problem for ocean-power efforts. If all goes well with its testing, OE-35 is set to be connected by subsea cable and start feeding power to the Hawaiian grid within weeks!
It might seem easy to dismiss this project because it’s tiny in comparison to more developed forms of renewable energy. There are solar farms in the works these days that are produce over a thousand times more electricity than OE-35, with their capacity measured in gigawatts instead of megawatts. But what’s exciting is that it’s a major growth milestone, the first grid-scale installation of a long-gestating technology, and it might just grow to become a major player in clean electron generation. The first-ever grid-scale solar farm was a 1.1-megawatt operation inaugurated back in 1982, just 42 years ago, and solar power has since grown to be a civilization-reshaping dynamo.
With sustained research and development, wave energy buoys could become a new rapidly-advancing modular contributor to the cleantech revolution, alongside solar panels, wind turbines, lithium-ion batteries, and emerging contenders like enhanced geothermal rigs and alternate battery chemistries. We need all the clean electrons we can get to decarbonize our civilization, so the more the merrier! Let’s make sure that wave energy gets a chance to happen.
Tell Congress to maintain U.S. funding for wave energy research!
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Technically any level of electricity generation could be connected up to feed into the grid, even one tiny palm-size solar panel, but “grid-scale” generally refers to “one megawatt of capacity or more.”