Eco Wave Power held a grand opening for the first onshore wave power station in the US today, at the Port of Los Angeles. The station is just a pilot so far, but Eco Wave Power has big aspirations.
The station is on the site of AltaSea, an “ocean technology hub” in a warehouse at the Port of LA.
The idea behind wave power is to use motion of waves in the ocean to generate electricity. Waves are relatively constant, and hold more power than wind, given that water is so much denser than air. They also add another dimension to renewable power generation, which can help reduce intermittency.
However, wave power has been considered for centuries and has been tried several times, with little evidence yet of its scalability. The industry, such as it is, is definitely still in the development stage. So this pilot program has a big hill to climb if it’s going to succeed as a demonstration.
Eco Wave Power’s project is rather humble for now, consisting of seven blue painted buoys, which the company calls “floaters,” approximately in the shape of boats. The floaters are designed to lift and drop with the waves, driving a hydraulic ram to create pressure in a bank of storage tanks in a nearby shipping container (the “conversion unit”), which is then used to spin a turbine generator.
The project will run for two years, though it’s still primarily for demonstration and research purposes. Ocean environments are caustic and chaotic, so there are a lot of problems that could come up. But Eco Wave Power has tried to mitigate one of the potential problems by using biodegradeable hydraulic fluid, just in case there’s any sort of leak.
There could be potential terawatts of power generation available from wave power nationwide, but that would require deployment over much of the US coastline. Eco Wave Power says it could power 60,000 homes with a larger deployment, taking up around 8 miles of breakwater structures built around the Port of LA/Long Beach complex. The system is designed to be modular, so that more floaters and shipping containers could be added depending on the available area.
Alternately, the power could be used to help fuel the port itself. Ports tend to be dirty areas, and Long Beach/LA is no difference. Air quality in the area is quite poor, which is why the port is rushing to clean up pollution. Wave power could provide some onsite power for port operations, and perhaps help to run electrified port equipment.
And if the project were big enough to export power beyond the port, the benefit of being in a port is that there are always nearby electrical substations, so it’s not hard to find a grid connection.
But as of now, we’ve got 7 floaters to start.
Currently, the floaters are placed inside the breakwater, in the channel that is protected from ocean waves. Therefore, they’re not going to generate nearly as much power as if they were placed on the outside of the breakwater itself, where waves are larger, more consistent, and much more powerful. But this is a test project, after all.
At the opening event, minutes after the floaters were dropped into the water, we saw them turn the system on and generate… 1.6kW worth of power. It’s a pretty calm day, after all, and the system hadn’t really had time to build up any pressure.
Eco Wave Power says that a setup of this size could have a potential output of 100kW, though we did get some conflicting numbers on that, and we suspect the numbers change drastically based on positioning and water conditions. It has one grid-connected power station in Israel which has been operational for a few months now, but we asked how much energy it has produced, and the company said that it had not released that information yet.
The new LA station is actually the first onshore wave power station in the US, though there has previously been an offshore wave power pilot in Hawaii. There are benefits and downsides to each method, but onshore is cheaper to install and maintain, if you can get access to the shoreline needed – and port breakwaters are a good opportunity for that.
Eco Wave Power says it also has projects in Taiwan, India and Portugal coming soon. It formerly operated a pilot program in Gibraltar. Its projects so far have been in relatively protected areas (Israel and Gibraltar are both on the Mediterranean, and LA is inside the port), but it has future projects coming that will be exposed to the ocean, like in Taiwan and Portugal, which should offer a whole new set of challenges – and unlock much more power, if the company is able to harness the turbulence of the Pacific.
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