WAVES OF ENERGY

Energy from the motion of the ocean; A former surfer designs a buoy that can convert wave motion into electricity
Dan Drollette, December 16, 2006 (Fortune Small Business Magazine via CNN Money)
- If you wanted to choose the perfect location for capturing the ocean's energy, you couldn't do much better than the Oregon coast…Starting in 2007, those massive, ceaseless waves will help light homes and businesses along the West Coast…

- A former surfer who grew up in Australia, [entrepreneur George]Taylor, now 72, studied electrical engineering and spent the past 40 years as a small-business owner in the U.S. His most recent invention is a buoy that can convert a wave's up-and-down motion into electricity, which can be carried ashore by undersea cables and fed into the national power grid…
- [buoys] deployed a mile or so offshore, either individually or linked together in a field of a dozen or more covering 30 acres of the ocean's surface…an environmentalist's dream - barely visible from the beach, drawing on an abundant, renewable energy resource, with little or no impact upon marine life and emitting no gases that contribute to global warming…
- A handful of competitors are designing similar wave-power systems, but Taylor's company,Ocean Power Technologies, based in Pennington, N.J., is the furthest along, say experts, with working prototypes in the water and generating power off several countries…no other U.S. company is close to matching OPT's progress…

- researchers at Oregon State University say that only 0.2 percent of the ocean's untapped wave energy could power the entire world…about 60 percent of the world's population lives within 40 miles of a coast.
- The buoys Taylor plans to install off Oregon in 2007 will generate electricity at rates competitive with that produced by coal - currently the cheapest, most abundant, most commonly used (and dirtiest) source of energy, at about 4.5 cents a kilowatt hour. Future generations of the buoys could conceivably produce power more cheaply than that…
- Ocean Power Technologies illustrates the saying that it takes 20 years to become an overnight success…initially considered wind power, which at the time was the most mature proven technology and is still considered highly promising. But they foresaw a number of problems with wind, especially on the scale needed to generate commercially significant electricity: Wind is unpredictable and often intermittent, and generally requires big, unsightly turbines…By comparison, waves are abundant and predictable…

- The company has tried to perfect its technology on a small scale and then make it bigger. Ocean Power launched its first experimental buoy off the New Jersey coast in 1997…
- Last year Ocean Power installed a 40-kilowatt version in 100 feet of water nearly a mile off the Hawaiian coast to provide supplemental power for the U.S. Navy. That project - a contract worth about $7 million - is still expanding. Five more buoys are to be installed, each progressively larger, in a field that will ultimately generate as much as one megawatt of electricity, or enough to power as many as 1,000 homes…
- The Navy enlisted an outside firm, Honolulu-based Belt Collins (beltcollins.com), to assess the environmental impact of the buoys. It found that the problems environmentalists had feared - marine mammals getting entangled in the mooring line, or electrical faults disrupting sea life - did not occur. If anything, the undersea cables and anchors provided a place for coral to grow and attracted fish, much like an artificial reef. Similarly, there were no effects upon currents or wave patterns, no electromagnetic disturbances, no heat generation, and no undersea noise to disturb sea creatures.
- The buoys used in the Reedsport, Ore., project will be Taylor's biggest yet - 30 feet wide, weighing 50 tons and capable of generating 150 kilowatts each - but they work the same way…
- It sounds simple enough, but the key lies in the buoy's sophisticated sensors. No two waves are identical, so sensors measure each wave in the first tenth of a second as it passes, and an onboard computer "tunes" the buoy, adjusting the travel and resistance of the piston mechanism to capture as much of the wave's energy as possible. The system can even automatically lock and unlock the piston, protecting the buoy during storms. OPT holds 28 patents on the technology, with 16 more pending…

- one Reedsport fisherman gives Ocean Power's buoys a cautious endorsement…
- Taylor is still thinking bigger. By the year 2010 he plans to have a 100-ton, 37-foot-wide buoy that could generate 500 kilowatts, a size that he calls the "magic number," because that's the point at which substantial economies of scale kick in. An array of 40 buoys that size, linked together, could generate electricity at prices significantly less than that of a typical coal-burning power station, and far less than the price at plants that burn more expensive fuels such as natural gas. Clean electricity that cheap could be used to desalinate seawater, split water molecules to make hydrogen for fuel-cell cars, or provide inexpensive power for other ambitious, energy-hungry projects. Taylor's voice drops off as he dreams of the possibilities. "It's a very exciting thing to come late in one's career," he says "It keeps me young."