Ocean power surges forward

"Survivability" is a critical concern for all ocean power systems. Constant battering by waves has sunk more than one wave generator. But one of PowerBuoy's main claims is that its 56-foot-long prototype unit operated continuously for two years before being pulled for inspection.

"The ability to ride out passing huge waves is a very important part of our system," says Charles Dunleavy, OPT's chief financial officer. "Right now, the industry is basically just trying to assimilate and deal with many different technologies as well as the cost of putting structures out there in the ocean."

Beside survivability and economics, though, the critical question of impact on the environment remains.

"We think they're benign," EPRI's Mr. Bedard says. "But we've never put large arrays of energy devices in the ocean before. If you make these things big enough, they would have a negative impact."

Mr. Dunleavy is optimistic that OPT's technology is "not efficient enough to rob coastlines and their ecosystems of needed waves. A formal evaluation found the company's PowerBuoy installed near a Navy base in Hawaii as having "no significant impact," he says.

Gauging the environmental impacts of various systems will be studied closely in the WaveConnect program, along with observations gathered from fishermen, surfers, and coastal-impact groups, says David Eisenhauer, a PG&E spokesman, says.

"There's definitely good potential for this project," says Mr. Eisenhauer. "It's our responsibility to explore any renewable energy we can bring to our customers – but only if it can be done in an economically and environmentally feasible way."

Offshore wind is getting a boost, too. On April 22, the Obama administration laid out new rules on offshore leases, royalty payments, and easement that are designed to pave the way for investors.

Offshore wind power is a commercially ready technology, with 10,000 megawatts of wind power already deployed off European shores. Studies have shown that the US has about 500,000 megawatts of potential offshore wind power. Across 10 to 11 East Coast states, offshore wind could supply as much as 20 percent of the states' electricity demand without the need for long transmission lines, Hagerman notes.

But development has lagged, thanks to political opposition and regulatory hurdles. So the US remains about five years behind Europe on wave and tidal and farther than that on offshore wind, Bedard says. "They have 10,000 megawatts of offshore wind and we have zero."

While more costly than land-based wind power, new offshore wind projects have been shown in some studies to have a lower cost of energy than coal projects of the same size and closer to the cost of energy of a new natural-gas fired power plant, Hagerman says.

Offshore wind is the only ocean-energy technology ready to be deployed in gigawatt quantities in the next decade, Bedard says. Beyond that, wave and tidal will play important roles.

For offshore wind developers, that means federal efforts to clarify the rules on developing ocean wind power can't come soon enough. Burt Hamner plans a hybrid approach to ocean energy – using platforms that produce 10 percent wave energy and 90 percent wind power.

But Mr. Hamner's dual-power system has run into a bureaucratic tangle – with the Minerals Management Service and FERC both wanting his company to meet widely divergent permit requirements, he says.

"What the public has to understand is that we are faced with a flat-out energy crisis," Hamner says. "We have to change the regulatory system to develop a structure that's realistic for what we're doing."

To be feasible, costs for offshore wind systems must come down. But even so, a big offshore wind farm with hundreds of turbines might cost $4 billion – while a larger coal-fired power plant is just as much and a nuclear power even more, he contends.

"There is no cheap solution," Hamner says. "But if we're successful, the prize could be a big one."

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