• Ocean motion could produce 9 percent of U.S. electricity

    Georgia Institute of Technology / DOE

    A map generated by Georgia Tech's tidal energy resource database shows mean current speed of tidal streams.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Next-generation technologies that harvest electricity from ocean waves and tides sloshing along the U.S. coasts could provide about 9 percent of the nation's demand by 2030, according to a pair of recent studies.

    The findings, which include maps of these ocean energy resources, should help guide companies looking to develop them.

    "We have believed for a long time that the resource was significant and these assessments add a tremendous level of confidence to what that potential is," Mike Reed, water power team lead with the U.S. Department of Energy's Wind and Water Program told me Monday. 

    Today, about 6 percent of the nation's electricity comes from traditional hydropower projects, such as the Grand Coulee Dam, that direct the flow of the river through turbines to generate power.

    Since such dams plug up rivers and make it difficult for migrating fish species such as salmon to reach their spawning grounds, they have lost favor in recent years. 

    Looking forward, energy developers see promise in technologies that capture the energy in waves and tides off the coasts. 

    Designs to do this range from buoys that harness the up-and-down motion of passing waves to turbines on the ocean floor that are spun by the ebb and flow of the tides.

    The studies released earlier this month from the U.S. Department of Energy could help nudge along the development and deployment of these technologies by showing the resource is there to be captured.

    Motion of the ocean
    The U.S. uses about 4,000 terawatt hours of electricity per year. The maximum theoretical electric generation that could be produced from waves and tides is approximately 1,420 terawatt hours per year, the assessments found.

    "We are never suggesting that all of that would be captured," Hoyt Battey, team lead for water power market acceleration and deployment with the DOE Wind and Water Program, told me. 

    But based on the resource assessments and current understanding of what it will take to scale up and deploy the technology, wave and tidal power could be upwards of 9 percent by 2030.

    The DOE has set a goal that water power, including traditional hydroelectricity, total 15 percent of the nation's supply by 2030.

    To measure the wave resource, the DOE worked with the Electric Power Research Institute and Virginia Tech to develop a model that accurately predicted past wave regimes and used it to predict future wave climate.

    Those predictions are converted into wave power densities. As surfers know, waves from one day to the next are not the same, but they know what beaches tend to have the best waves when conditions are right, Reed noted.

    Like surfers trying to figure out where and when to vacation, utility owners and operators can use the new resource data to figure out where the best reliable waves are to put their converters.

    This knowledge, combined with reliable forecasts out several days on wave heights, will allow utilities to balance their loads with other sources such as a natural gas fired power plant.

    "Wave energy is predictable and forecastable," he said. "If you are a utility operator or utility owner, that predictability adds value."

    Tides are even more predictable, noted Battey. "You know down to the second years ahead of time what the tidal regime will be," he said.

    The tidal resource maps were created by researchers at Georgia Tech and are available online.

    Realizing the potential
    Resource assessments such as these, as well as others mapping potential geothermal, solar and wind resources, can nudge development of green energy technologies.

    But a key word in such assessments is "potential." As long as generating electricity from coal, oil, and natural gas remains cheap and politically salable, wave and tidal resources will struggle to compete.

    Reed takes the long view. Although wave and tidal energy projects today are expensive, he said, their costs should fall as the technology is improved and scaled up over the next few decades.

    "A good comparison would be to go back 15 to 20 years in the wind and solar industry and see how their costs have dramatically come down," he said.

    While wind and solar still struggle to compete with traditional sources today, the falling prices of the technologies and abundance of the resources are beginning to make them attractive.

    Given the size of the wave and tidal resource identified, Reed said there's plenty of room for wave and tidal energy developers to get their feet wet and begin to drive down costs.

    More on wave and tidal energy:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

     

     

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  • IBM sees energy, money in motion of the ocean

    Photo courtesy Ocean Energy, Ltd

    IBM is developing the technology and expertise to analyze the impact wave energy converters such as the one pictured here have on the noise environment of the ocean.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    The computer giant IBM sees a profitable future in high-tech analytical tools that could expedite and enhance the rollout of machines to turn the motion of the ocean into electricity.

    Such machines, called wave energy converters, are under development around the world as a means to tap what appears to be a clean, green source of renewable energy — wave power.

    But there's no standard design for the machines or a consistent and reliable way to measure their environmental impact, according to Harry Kolar, a chief information technology architect with IBM's Smarter Planet initiative.

    "In order for this industry to move forward, they have to do these environmental impact assessments, which include a lot of baseline studies in the case of noise," he told me.

    Noisy technology
    Scientists are concerned the noise generated by the machines could, for example, disturb marine mammals such as dolphins and whales that communicate with each other via sound waves and navigate via echo-location. 

    "Basically, a lot of noise degrades the habitat of marine mammals, makes it harder for them to live their lives and they may go somewhere else if it becomes bad enough," Jim Thomson, an assistant professor in the department of environmental fluid dynamics at the University of Washington, explained to me.

    Thomson is helping characterize the noise environment in Admiralty Inlet in Washington's northern Puget Sound for a pilot project with a local utility that will install underwater turbines to capture energy from the tides. The inlet has tidal currents that move as fast as 9 miles per hour.

    As elsewhere around the world, researchers are concerned about the impact the turbines will have on marine life there, including orca whales. One of the largest concerns is noise, Thomson noted, which travels five times faster underwater than it does in the air and can go farther.

    His team has done some data collection on the noise levels in Admiralty Inlet, where two turbines will be deployed in 2013, but he noted that the short duration of the projects and limited funds mean they lack a complete picture of the noise environment.

    Real time analytics
    The project with IBM and Sustainable Energy Ireland is unique in the sense that it will collect and analyze massive amounts of data on ocean noise in real-time. 

    The system consists of an off-shore buoy that is loaded up with sensors such as underwater microphones that collect data on the ocean environment and the computing power to process that data and stream it to shore-based engineers in real time.

    "We will be able to understand what's going on in a very dynamic environment," Kolar said. He and his team call this ability "real-time streaming analytics." 

    Thomson, who is not involved with the project, likened this ability to a person sitting at a concert and analyzing the noise coming from the violins and base and other instruments all at the same time.

    While this ability exists in separate pieces for ocean energy projects, the IBM collaboration is the first to bring all the technology together in the same place, at the same time, and with the ability to monitor continuously.

    Ultimately, these data should allow for a comprehensive picture of the underwater noise environment that should ease along the environmental permitting process and also help companies refine their wave energy machines.

    "To allow the industry to move forward, to deploy these machines, the faster they get in the water, the faster you get this clean energy piece," Kolar said.

    Ocean energy services
    IBM is hoping to employ its technology and expertise in characterizing the noise environment gained in Ireland to other countries and companies around the world looking to develop their own ocean energy industries.

    According to Thomson, this is a smart business strategy, assuming governments continue to support renewable energy technologies.

    "There's going to be a whole industry that crops up around it that's in support of it, that doesn't actually do the generation of the kilowatts, but that does all of the marine services, the environmental permitting and monitoring and all these things that surround the energy production," he said.

    IBM, it appears, is making a bet that ocean energy is an untapped space where it can be a major player.

    More on ocean energy technology:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

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