Team AquaHarmonics is proud to present the first complete build of our device! This photo was taken late at night as a tribute to our strange schedules, but the result of our dedicated work is a complete device ready for bench testing on schedule! We have a few remaining final parts to be manufactured and final ballasting to be completed, but the device is nearly tank ready. Next up for us is bench testing of the device with the control system and characterization of the Power Take Off. This puts us on track to do preliminary testing at Oregon State University in early June. Many thanks to everyone who has helped us get here on our highly demanding schedule. Stay tuned for more updates!

What do you think the role of government in driving innovation is?

The role of government in driving innovation is critical in the renewable energy sector in progressing these technologies towards viable commercialization in a few ways.

Particularly challenging to wave energy is the all important payback of the initial investment. Private investors typically seek short payback periods for their investments, and this has placed a huge burden on past wave energy development.

This has caused early developers to go from a partial scale model to full scale too quickly, and the resulting cost overruns in deployment and maintenance as well as less than anticipated power production has made investors of wave energy a bit leery. Wave energy development needs a more long term plan with more realistic expectations on payback to keep it moving.

Government funding, implemented in ways such as the Wave Energy Prize allow for a focused and critical view of the available technologies from highly skilled people in the field with these long term outlooks as a final goal. This can quickly reduce the field of available technologies to the most likely ones to succeed while giving developers direction into what matters in the big picture at the utility scale instead of only focusing on how to make power out of a single device.

The difficult part about wave energy is not how to make power as many devices that have been tried do in fact make power, but rather how to do it in an economic way. The Wave Energy Prize in particular can help fast track this solution by comparing the entire available field of devices in a true “Apples to Apples” comparison.

If you look at the state of wave energy technology, you have over topping devices, point absorbers, oscillating water column devices, line terminators—-the list goes on. As humans we are very good at optimizing something once we know what to optimize, and with wave energy, we don’t know what that is yet. We all know the best ways to make power from wind energy for instance. It is a blade attached to a generator placed on a tower.

All of these aspects have been around for awhile and we have put our time into optimizing the height of the tower, it’s location, the design of the blade, the design of the generator, etc. This has resulted in wind energy being a very competitive resource. We know what a car and an airplane should be and we have optimized them. Wave energy simply hasn’t found the device to focus on for optimizing. Once we do, the development will certainly move very quickly to becoming highly competitive.

What is unique about your device?

Our device Power Take Off is unique in that it uses relatively simple and well known power technologies to convert wave motion to electrical power in very few steps, with no limit in operational stroke, meaning it can make full use of any given wave height with no “end stop” conditions. The device hull is a simple, robust shape designed to handle the worst weather conditions it may see in operation. This design strategy results in a wave energy converter that is simple, light weight, robust and low in capital cost.