PacWave is building the biggest wave energy test facility in the world

Two and a half hours outside Portland on the Oregon coast, almost 50 miles of cables sit under the turquoise Pacific waters. They connect to a vault underneath the parking lot of Driftwood Beach State Park, delivering power generated by waves to shore.

The vault, cables, a subsea pod, and wave testing devices are all part of PacWave, an Oregon State University (OSU) test site that will be used by companies developing technology to convert energy from waves into electricity. The nearly completed site, which is partially funded by the Department of Energy (DOE), plans to host wave energy companies for two to three years while they generate power and test their devices. The goal is to host as many companies as possible to create a “convergence of technology”—something that wave energy has never had before.

“The ideas are all over the place,” PacWave’s director, Dan Hellin, told Tech Brew of the wave energy industry, “which is why we need a test site so people can test, prove, and the industry will come down to a handful of different designs that are shown to work.”

Home sweet Oregon: The test site was constructed in Oregon for a host of reasons, including the impressive capacity of the waves off its coast: In the summer, the average wave is between four and five feet tall. And when PacWave was first being conceived, its architects at OSU and the DOE realized that it had a lot of support—both politically and in terms of the people who would be affected by having such technology out in the ocean, like the state’s fishing community.

But with big waves come survivability challenges. One of the reasons that it’s been historically difficult to test wave energy in Oregon is because though its four- to five-foot waves represent around 95% of the conditions in that area of the Pacific, according to Hellin, extreme conditions can occur in the remaining 5% of the time. That means the technology has to be able to survive the mighty waves and absorb their energy.

“[We’re] putting devices out there that need to sit out there for years. You can’t be pulling them back to shore the whole time,” Hellin said. “So it’s just challenging, that survivability of equipment sitting out in the ocean trying to absorb the pounding of waves, generate power, and not be breaking down the whole time.”

Potential energy: But Hellin said all the work that it’s taken to get PacWave to the finish line—he’s been working on the project for 12 years—is worth it, because wave energy has so much potential. According to the Energy Information Administration, waves off US coasts generate 2.64 trillion kilowatthours of energy, an amount equivalent to almost two-thirds of the utility-scale electricity generated in the country annually.

Of course, all that energy can’t be harnessed without technology like PacWave, but what’s generated by the site will someday add to the US renewable energy supply.

PacWave’s impact was made possible largely by the DOE; in 2008, the agency created national marine centers, one of which is at OSU. Then in 2016, Hellin and the other scientists behind PacWave won a funding award that made building the test site possible.

In addition to construction, much of the work that went into getting PacWave ready for use was permitting. PacWave scientists and the DOE ensured that the site is pre-permitted for an array of wave energy devices, meaning that when companies want to hook up their technology, they don’t have to go procure a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission license before they can get started.

With the red tape largely managed, testing can soon commence, Lauren Ruedy, chief engineer at the DOE’s Water Power Technologies Office, told Tech Brew.

“We’re looking forward to seeing projects start going in the water as early as next year,” Ruedy said. “The team is really excited to start seeing this facility get used.”

It’s a wave: Even though the new Trump administration has put new limits on harvesting renewable energy, Tim Ramsey, a DOE marine energy program manager who’s been at the department through multiple administrations, told Tech Brew that marine energy tends to receive steady bipartisan support. In fact, the DOE’s marine power budget grew during the first Trump administration, when PacWave started construction.

“There’s a lot to really love about marine energy. It’s local energy. It’s basically 24/7 energy—waves are coming all the time,” Ramsey said. “There’s a lot to lean into on both sides of the aisle, so we tend to get pretty good support regardless of administrations.”

That’s welcome news to site director Hellin, who’s raring to go. He told Tech Brew that wave energy has a long way to go to compete with wind and solar power—in no small part because its “relevant environment” is in the choppy, open ocean.

“We’re 10 to 20 years behind wind,” Hellin said. “We have to catch up. And that’s what PacWave is about.”