After more than a decade, a new facility that aims to spur the development of wave energy technology opened last week off the Oregon Coast. AP first reported the opening of PacWave, which features two sites in the open ocean near Newport where companies can test devices they’re building to convert energy from waves into electricity.
Oregon State University developed PacWave with $140 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. It’s the first such testing facility connected to the continental U.S. energy grid and is pre-permitted. Director Dan Hellin says that can save companies time and money since they don’t need to secure additional state and federal approval for testing, which he expects to start next summer. The Bonneville Power Administration has an exclusive agreement with OSU to buy all the electricity generated by PacWave.
But hurdles remain. As OPB’s “All Science, No Fiction” previously reported, companies trying to develop this technology have hit federal funding delays. The Trump administration has also cancelled offshore and solar wind projects, raising concerns about the future of renewables in the U.S.
Hellin joins us for a discussion.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. After 10 years and $140 million of federal money, a new OSU facility that aims to spur the development of wave energy technology opened last week off the Oregon Coast. It’s called PacWave. It is the first testing facility that is connected to the continental U.S. energy grid. And it is pre-permitted, meaning companies won’t have to secure their own permits in order to see how their wave energy technology performs in the open ocean.
Dan Hellin is the director of PacWave. He joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Dan Hellin: Thanks for having me, Dave.
Miller: What’s the big idea behind a wave energy test facility?
Hellin: So wave energy has been pretty slow to develop. It’s one of the unknown renewable energy sources. One of the challenges is having places in the world where you can test full-scale devices ready to connect to the grid. That’s really what PacWave is. It provides the infrastructure for companies who are developing this technology to bring their devices to the ocean off Oregon, connect to the grid, and basically test their devices to prove that they can generate power, that there’s survivability [and] that the quality of power is good enough to go on the grid.
Miller: How did you select your particular grid-connected site, which is about 10 miles south of Newport?
Hellin: It was a really interesting process that started back in 2011 or 2012 when the idea of a grid-connected site had been floated. Folks from Oregon State University and Oregon Sea Grant started reaching out to local communities up and down the coast to see if they were interested in having a site located off their community. Ultimately, there was a process that was gone through and Newport was selected. Then ultimately, we had certain criteria that were required in terms of water depth and sea floor type.
There was a committee that had been established by Lincoln County, called Fishermen Involved in Natural Energy. It was charter fishermen and commercial fishermen who were there to review marine energy projects. Basically, the story is that they got together. They laid a nautical chart on the table. They talked about the criteria that we had for siting our facility. And then they drew a box on the chart based on that information. That’s how we got the location for our site.
Miller: Is it fair to say that commercial boats or recreational ones can’t go where the future wave energy testing site is going to be? There’s stuff bobbing in the water there, which means that they can’t fish there?
Hellin: So we don’t exclude people from that site, but the Coast Guard is definitely recommending that people try to avoid it if they can. Mainly because we are gonna have obviously devices potentially on the surface. But we’re also gonna have cables and potentially wave energy devices below the surface. So it’s kind of a navigation risk to be in that area.
Miller: So that siting you said was in 2011, 2012. Why has this taken so long?
Hellin: That’s a very good question. Once we had the site, we moved into a permitting process, and our permitting process took us about eight years. There were a number of reasons for that. No one had really permitted a facility like this before. A lot of state and federal agencies [were] involved. And as you mentioned, we’re a pre-permitted site. So it was really important to companies who were going to come and test that the site was pre-permitted. They didn’t have to go through their own long federal or state permitting process.
Basically, Oregon State University is the licensee for all of these required permits and licenses. That took a long time to work through. Once we had that completed, we moved into the construction phase, which was in 2021. That took us another four-and-a-half years. So it’s been a long, long process.
Miller: When I said that this is the only testing site that’s connected to the continental grid, does that mean that right now there is some kind of electrical line that’s connected to the grid and then juts out on the sea floor into the ocean?
Hellin: Yeah, so we have four cables. Our site offshore is divided into four berths, which is so we can support four different companies at one time. Each of those berths has a subsea cable running from the site to shore, and then to our shoreside facility which is a substation. Those cables were installed in 2024. They have connectors on the end sitting 260 feet underwater on the sea floor, ready to be pulled up to the surface and for people to connect their devices to them.
Miller: How far offshore are they?
Hellin: The site itself is about 7 miles offshore.
Miller: So that means, I don’t know, something like 30 miles of electrical cable?
Hellin: Yeah, so we’ve got four cables, and our cables actually loop around the western side of the site, so we installed almost 48 miles of subsea cable.
Miller: OK, everything that we’ve been talking about so far … We’re talking about grid connectivity and permitting. But what are some of the big technical challenges for wave energy production itself? In other words, what kinds of things are your customers going to be testing out?
Hellin: One of the things with wave energy is there’s a lot of different ideas, a lot of different technology designs about how to capture the energy of waves and convert it into electricity. I always look at wind turbines. Wind turbines are based on windmills that have been around for a huge amount of time. That’s not true with wave energy. There’s a lot of different ideas out there. So what we really need to do, if wave energy is to take off, is we really need to focus down onto some technologies that are proven to work.
It’s obviously generating power, [which] is critically important. But it’s also survivability out there in the ocean, low operation and maintenance costs. You can’t have devices that are breaking down the whole time, needing to be towed into shore. These are substantial devices. So part of that is what we’re trying to test out and prove for these developers out in the ocean. Put a device out there for one, two, three years, produce electricity that’s of quality that can go on the grid, and do it efficiently and relatively cost effectively.
Miller: I like the comparison to wind turbines. I mean, I’m not an expert on them, but when I drive around and see them all over the Columbia Plateau, or see pictures of them, they all do seem relatively similar. Maybe the blades are slightly different shapes, but they’re all pretty similar. How different are the contenders for wave energy production right now?
Hellin: There’s all sorts of different ideas. Some devices are mounted on the sea floor. Others are buoys that bob up and down. Some are subsurface. Some are kind of articulated platforms that move with the waves. There are so many ideas out there at the moment, some of which seem kind of crazy. Until you can get to that stage of actually building them and testing them, they may be really good.
Miller: Is there a front runner in terms of design right now?
Hellin: It’s really difficult to say. There are some companies that are looking good. Some of the earlier front runners a few years ago have since gone out of business, which is not unusual with a new industry and new technology. It’s really evolving quite quickly. People are coming up with different ideas. Again, until we can get them in the water, it’s very difficult to know. There’s some that are conceptually really good. But very few devices have been tested simply because there are not a lot of facilities, like PacWave, in the world for people to test.
Miller: Does the battering of water and the salt water in and of itself a major challenge when it comes to some big piece of machinery that you’d want to operate for, I don’t know, decades?
Hellin: Absolutely. That’s one of the reasons that Oregon’s such a great place to test, because we always have good waves off the coast of Oregon. But during the summer you’ve got several months of relatively benign conditions in which to deploy your equipment and get everything ready. But then you have the winter. Come October, the conditions can get really bad.
We had a wave buoy out there in February of last year that was hit by a 46-foot wave. So if you can survive the saltwater and the ocean conditions out there during the Oregon winter, you’re pretty much proving that your technology’s going to hold up to most conditions that might be thrown at it.
Miller: We’ve now talked about two big themes so far. I’m curious which one you think is a bigger hurdle, the technical issues that we’ve just been talking about, or the permitting and regulatory ones that meant it took you 15 years to get to this testing site?
Hellin: I think, at the moment, the whole permitting process is a barrier. However, part of what we went through in our permitting process and the monitoring that’s required to happen around the deployments of devices at our site … As more data is gathered, our hope is that the permitting process will become simpler. At the moment, agencies are cautious, as they should be, about what effects these devices may have. But as we test a whole load of devices, if we’re not finding environmental effects, then we can relax to a certain extent about some of those potential effects.
Miller: What are the potential environmental concerns, or what are the actual environmental concerns that people have?
Hellin: One of them is the effects on the sea floor. Basically, PacWave is a sandy sea floor, and we’re going to be putting anchors and so on out there. So you’re adding infrastructure to the sea floor and that will have some effects on the sea floor. We’re monitoring for those. Another concern is noise generated by these devices. You’ve got chains, mooring systems, the devices themselves, and then you have whales and other organisms that noise can affect. There are regulatory thresholds on sound levels. So that’s, again, something that we’re looking at. Another one that concerns people is potential for electromagnetic fields and how those might affect things like sharks and rays, and potentially Dungeness crab.
All of those things are going to be monitored as part of our permitting requirements. One of the nice things about being part of Oregon State University is that we have Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, which is where most of the scientists that we’re using for our environmental monitoring come from. These are career academics. So it’s a great opportunity to further the science and hopefully answer some of the questions that the regulators have about potential effects.
Miller: I want to turn to politics. Donald Trump has been very skeptical of some renewable energy, in particular wind and solar. What is the administration’s position on wave energy?
Hellin: That’s a fair question. What we’ve seen so far is that wave energy appears to fit quite well within the administration’s broader energy agenda. There’s been a number of times that the administration has identified energy from the movement of water as an important domestic energy resource. And that’s exactly what marine energy is, whether that’s tidal energy or wave energy, or even energy from rivers. So many people see marine energy more aligned with traditional, conventional hydropower in the fact that it’s kind of in the water power family. So we haven’t seen the same level of scrutiny that some of the other renewables, such as wind and solar, have with the current administration.
Miller: How many developers would you say that you’ve talked to seriously so far? How many developers have expressed interest in testing out their potential products at your site?
Hellin: There’s a lot of developers who have expressed interest. Some of them may be a little optimistic in their timelines on it. But we currently have three companies lined up to come and test, all funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, who funded PacWave. But there are probably 20 or 30 more in the world who are probably at the point of realistically coming to test with us. Quite what the timeline would be for that is still to be determined. A lot of them are relying on some sort of federal funding to get in the water.
Miller: OK, so there are 20 or 30 more in the works. But of the three that are actually going to be testing, how far along are they?
Hellin: We’re hoping that the first companies will be in the water starting next year. In the next two years, we’re hoping that we will have these three companies in the water. They’re ready to go. They’ve gone through a huge amount of design work. Most of them have done some in-water testing. They’re really ready to go to that fabrication stage, start chartering vessels, ready to install anchors, and put their devices in our site.
Miller: How long might their test device, a test array, be in the water before it could be deemed viable? How long might testing take?
Hellin: That’s a good question. Some of these developers aren’t yet at their final version of their device. It’s an iterative process to develop technology. But the ones who are close to commercialization, who are ready to put their devices into the real world, are probably looking at getting a good two years at least of good solid data and performance of their device before they can really take something to investors and say this is a viable option.
Miller: Over the course of those two years, will the electricity that is being generated ideally by these devices, if all is going well – as we said earlier, this is grid connected – will that be flowing to any Oregon customers?
Hellin: Yeah, that’s the idea. So our cables come ashore in Seal Rock, and we have a facility there. We connect directly to Central Lincoln People’s Utility District, the local district. And we actually have a power purchase agreement with Bonneville Power Administration, which is the regional power body. So the idea is that electrons will be flowing onto the grid, they’ll be powering homes and businesses, and then the developers who are testing with us through Bonneville and the power purchase agreement, will get paid for that power that’s generated.
Miller: Let’s say that one of these companies, or all of them, have successful in-water tests at your site. What then would have to happen before they could actually install utility-level arrays of their technology?
Hellin: First, they would have to find another site because our site is a test site. We’re permitted as a test site, not a commercial site. The idea for our site is people come in, they test for a while, then they move on. So they would need to find a location where they wanted to deploy their devices. They would need somewhere where the power would be purchased. And then they would need to put in the infrastructure to connect to whatever consumers of the power that there are.
The most likely early scenarios you’re going to see for wave energy is probably going to be community-level power generation. There’s a lot of interest for small communities in places like Alaska that are currently relying on diesel generators that aren’t on the grid. To start off with, like with any of this technology, it’s gonna be quite expensive, the electricity. As it was with wind and solar, costs have now come down significantly. But wave is going to be expensive to start off with. So where you’ll probably see the initial deployments of wave energy is in those small communities.
Miller: Dan, thanks very much.
Hellin: My pleasure.
Miller: Dan Hellin is a director of PacWave.
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