Administration of the Wave Energy Converter (WEC) Prize Award Number: DE-EE0006738 CX(s) Applied: B5.15 Water Power Technologies Office Date: 02/08/2016 Location(s): MI Office(s): Golden Field Office
Office of NEPA Policy and Compliance
February 11, 2016
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Administration of the Wave Energy Converter (WEC) Prize
Award Number: DE-EE0006738
CX(s) Applied: B5.15
Water Power Technologies Office
Date: 02/08/2016
Location(s): MI
Office(s): Golden Field Office
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is proposing to provide federal funding to Ricardo, Inc. for the administration of the Wave Energy Converter (WEC) Prize Challenge. The goals of the WEC Prize Challenge are to attract innovative ideas from developers new to the industry and next generation ideas from existing developers by offering a monetary prize purse and providing an opportunity for tank testing and evaluation of scaled WEC prototypes.
The proposed activities relevant to this review would include the hosting of a WEC Prize Award Event at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Carderock, MD., in November of 2016. This event would showcase finalists and winners and their technologies; showcase DOE’s efforts to incentivize innovation in WEC technology; showcase the Navy’s support for wave energy; and engage stakeholders and the public. Teams would set up displays in the Carderock auditorium where they would interact with attendees to explain and showcase their technologies. This would be followed by a technical review. Finally, attendees would receive a demonstration of the winning team’s WEC device at the MASK basin facility. Use of the MASK basin facility itself and the placing of WEC devices in the test tank at that facility were approved in a previous NEPA review (GFO-0006738-001, CX-A9, and CX-B3.6, 9/05/2014).