As reported this past Saturday in The New York Times, a network of approximately 200 buoys located offshore in the Pacific Ocean could provide enough energy to power the equivalent of Portland's business district. That is a tantalizing prospect, indeed and it is thanks to a program under way to employ buoys to harness electricity from Wave Energy.

Several types of technology are being tested. Some would use turbines that would be rotated by Wave Energy. A type being tested at Oregon State University would employ a magnet inside of a winding that would rise and fall developing a voltage. This past fall a prototype of a wave energy buoy was tested by anchoring it 2.5 miles off the Oregon coast in 130 feet of water.
But Wave Energy is no stranger to Great Britain, for a nearly 400-foot long, 11.5-foot-wide device off the coast of Scotland — and about the size of four train cars — is the first commercial-scale floating-wave energy converter and is currently generating electricity for Great Britain's power grid. When floating on the sea, hinged joints between its articulated cylindrical sections move with the waves, powering hydraulic motors that generate electricity.

Ocean Power Technologies is a company planning a project off the West Coast of the United States and has a permit to build a wave "farm" that could generate up to 50 megawatts of electricity. By comparison, a typical coal-burning plant produces approximately 600 megawatts. Two other companies engaged in the project are Finavera Renewables, a Canadian company, and Ocean Power Technologies. It is expected that Wave Farms will be built two to three miles offshore, covering as much as several square miles.

The first federal permit was granted for a wave energy farm this past February to a company that wants to study the ocean area 60 miles south of Newport, Oregon. Since then, three more permits have been granted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Another company engaged in the project is Finavera Renewables based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

According to studies by the Electric Power Research Institute, waves on the West Coast acquire four times as much energy as waves on the East Coast because they have more time to acquire momentum before they encounter the coast of Northern California, Oregon and Washington.

Alan Wallace and Annette von Jouanne, electrical engineering professors at Oregon State University are proposing that a national ocean energy center be set up that would have its headquarters at their university. They have been developing wave energy extraction devices for the past two years with a $270,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and additional money from Oregon Sea Grant.

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