It’s an exciting time for the renewable power sector in the State of California as it will soon be home to the first wave energy project in the United States. Los Angeles has been identified as the ideal location for the innovative pilot project, which has one important feature that makes it more attractive than solar or wind options. If the wave energy project delivers on efficiency and cost-effectiveness, it’s quite likely that similar installations will start cropping up along the coast of the United States soon.
The Port of Los Angeles is hosting the first wave energy project in the US
Wave energy harvesting is a minor player in the green electricity sector, accounting for just 0.02% of the world’s power. However, one could say that its potential is greater than solar or wind power, considering that the waves never stop breaking like the sun stops shining or the wind stops blowing. This is the feature of wave energy that makes it stand out from other forms of unreliable renewable energy sources.
Southern California has all the wave energy anyone could ask for
Southern California is the perfect place to install a wave energy power generation system, considering that powerful ocean activity is in abundant supply along its coastline. The Port of Los Angeles will soon feature a power project that is modeled after a similar system already operating successfully in Israel.
The entities collaborating on the project are renewable energy company Eco Wave Power, which will be in charge of the endeavor, and non-profit organization AltaSea, both of which are heavily invested in developing clean energy solutions.
Another energy solution being worked on involving the ocean but harvesting wind energy instead of wave or tidal energy is a futuristic floating “wall of wind turbines” called the Windcatcher from Norway.
How does the wave energy system work, and is the technology viable?
Eco Wave Power is on a mission to combat climate change by harvesting the power of the ocean and facilitating commercial power production. The company has developed its own patented smart technology that draws on the limitless energy of sea waves into green electricity in a cost-effective manner, and this is what it will be applying in the pilot testing phase in the Port of Los Angeles.
The infrastructure behind the wave energy harvesting technology is a blue metal structure around the size of an average sedan that’s designed to be affixed to a jetty or breakwater. Its motion is simple in that as it floats, it just needs to bob up and down in the water together with the motion of the waves. When installed in an array, the floats resemble a string of piano keys rising and falling gracefully in the waves.
The floats in the Port of Los Angeles, which will be supplied by Eco Wave Power, will be mounted to a concrete pier in the port’s main channel.
The coastal ocean tech involves air feeding a turbine
The Los Angeles wave project received co-funding in part from a major oil company, Shell MRE, which provided 50% of the funding for this demonstration and educational project.
AltaSea Chief Executive Terry Tamminen explained:
“There’s this piston arm attached to the float that acts like a bicycle pump. So as the float goes up and down, so does this bicycle pump arm.”
The pumped air is fed into a series of storage tanks behind the floats, where it’s discharged as required:
“When you want the energy, you release the pressure from here, it spins the turbine, and now you have stored intermittent renewables without a battery.”
What sets the Los Angeles wave energy project apart from the rest?
Eco Wave Power founder Inna Braverman believes that other wave energy companies’ projects have failed because their installations were located too far out at sea. She explained the cost involved with offshore options:
“That was extremely expensive, because you need ships, you need divers, you need underwater mooring, you need cables. It was breaking down all the time, because in the offshore, you get extremely high waves.”
The pilot project on the coastline overcomes these challenges, but there is a shortcoming. So far, it can only deliver enough power for around 80 houses, which is nowhere near what solar and wind are capable of. The technology will need to be significantly scaled up to become viable for further investment and development, but there’s room for development, such as a tidal energy system being deployed that involves underwater “kites”.
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