OES Annual Report 2012 - Ocean Energy Systems

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Public Utility District No.1 of Snohomish County (SnoPUD) filed a Final License Application with FERC
on March 1, 2012 and is awaiting FERC approval for the Admiralty Inlet project (Everett, Washington). The
project proposes to deploy, operate, monitor, and evaluate two Open-Centre Turbines, developed and
manufactured by OpenHydro Group Ltd., in Admiralty Inlet of Puget Sound.
In 2012 Northwest Energy Innovations (NWEI), in partnership with other industry leaders from New
Zealand, verified the ocean wavelength functionality of the Wave Energy Technology-New Zealand (WET-
NZ) device through wave tank testing and a controlled open sea deployment of their 1:2 scale device. The
WET-NZ was deployed on August 22, 2012 at the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center
(NNMREC) off the coast of Oregon. Six weeks of successful testing were completed and the device was
removed. Following testing and the award of a DOE grant, the WET-NZ device will begin a 1 year test at
the U.S. Navy’s Wave Energy Test Site (WETS) located at the Marine Corps Base on Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii.
This past year Resolute Marine Energy (RME) deployed a surge wave energy converter at Jennette’s Pier
in Nags Head, North Carolina. The full scale, TRL 5/6 device was deployed for approximately one month
in November of 2012. RME is continuing the development of their technology and plans to test the device
again in early FY13.
Vortex Hydro performed open water testing of a hydrofoil device in the St. Clair River in Port Huron,
Michigan. The device was deployed in September of 2012 for two weeks to test enhancements to the
energy capture and efficiency of the device.
In 2012 FloDesign completed a short demonstration test of their device with funding from DOE’s SBIR/
STTR Program. The developer conducted two in-water demonstrations with their Mixer Ejector Hydrokinetic
Turbine device (a ducted turbine) at the University of New Hampshire’s Tidal Energy Site and in the
Muskeget Channel in Massachusetts.
Oscilla Power was selected for a $1 million DOE SBIR Phase II award to further develop its iMEC TM wave
energy harvesting technology with testing of a sub-scale system in late 2013 and early 2014 in open water
off the coast of New Hampshire. The technology uses reverse magnetostrictive technology to convert
mechanical energy into electrical energy without moving parts.
Dehlsen Associates, LLC demonstrated its Centipod wave energy converter off the coast of Santa Barbara,
California in late November. This test did not include power generation, but data gathered from the test
will inform the design and construction of a larger scale device that will be tested in early 2013.
Testing Infrastructure Development
Test facilities are intended to offer a wide range of testing services that address both technical and
nontechnical barriers of MHK systems. By spearheading the development of a testing infrastructure, DOE
ensures that many more prototypes from a diverse set of technology developers can be tested than if
each developer had to carry the cost of developing, permitting, and installing its own test facility. In this
way, superior technology performance and design will determine which technologies will succeed, rather
than those able to garner the most funding. In 2012 the United States’ testing infrastructure advanced
significantly.
Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center (NNMREC) – Wave and Tidal Test Facility
NNMREC completed permitting requirements for an open water wave energy test site in Reedsport,
Oregon in 2012, and on August 22, scientists from NNMREC demonstrated a new $1.5 million testing
device called the Ocean Sentinel. Resembling a bright yellow dock equipped with an array of measuring
instruments, the Ocean Sentinel floats on the water’s surface and is currently set up in a 1 square-mile test
site two miles northwest of Yaquina Head off the Oregon coast. The Ocean Sentinel is designed for testing
wave energy converters and provides power analysis, data acquisition, environmental monitoring, and an
active converter interface to control power dissipation to an on-boar electrical load.
ANNUAL
REPORT 2012