NEWPORT, Ore. - Sep 5

 

A private company and a local government have become the first in the nation to seek federal approval to build wave energy projects - both off the coast of Oregon.

New Jersey-based Ocean Power Technologies filed a pre-application permit in July with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for a commercial wave project off the coast of Reedsport. The project would initially generate about 2 megawatts of electricity from buoys in a wave park about 2.5 miles off the coast, the company said in a statement to The Oregonian newspaper. After that, the company plans to seek approval for a full-scale 50-megawatt power plant.

Separately, Lincoln County commissioners last month filed a pre-application permit to study the county's coast as a potential site for Oregon State University's national wave energy research and demonstration center.

Annette von Jouanne, an electrical engineering professor at Oregon State University, said researchers from across the world would come to Oregon to test their wave devices.

Von Jouanne said waves generate electricity through motion. She and her colleague, the late Alan Wallace, developed several wave energy buoy prototypes that contain a magnetic shaft and electric coils. As the waves roll in, the motion moves the coils up and down the shaft, generating voltage that produces electricity. Insulated cables in the water would bring the electricity to shore.

"It is estimated that if two-tenths of a percent of the oceans' untapped energy could be harnessed, it could provide power sufficient for the entire world," she said.

In Oregon, estimates indicate waves could produce a potential of about 14,000 megawatts of power, said Roger Bedard of the Electric Power Research Institute, a Palo Alto, Calif., nonprofit organization that researches energy and the environment.

The state gets good waves because global winds blow west to east.

"As the global winds blow over a long stretch of water, the waves get bigger and bigger and bigger," Bedard said. "The storms off the Sea of Japan and the Gulf of Alaska bring big swells into the Oregon coast."

Though there is momentum for alternative energy projects, Lincoln County and Ocean Power Technologies must get through the federal permitting process and then seek licenses.

The permitting and licensing procedure typically takes more than five years, but the state is working with federal regulators to get it done within three years, said Greg McMurray, marine affairs coordinator with the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development.

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Information from: The Oregonian, http://www.oregonlive.com