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The U.S. Department of Energy is helping wave power technology company Resolute Marine Energy Inc. move ocean power up to the industrial level.
While Watertown-based Resolute continues to refine its proprietary wave power generation device to be as efficient and reliable as possible (see related story), the DOE has given it a $100,000 Phase 1 Small Business Innovation grant to develop the technology that would control hundreds of such devices in a massive wave-power array — the scale needed to generate megawatts of electricity.
“This is a project that we have been wanting to do for quite some time,” said Bill Staby, founder and CEO of Resolute.
The startup has already lined up the internal team members that will be working on the project, as well as outside partners and subcontractors. Among those partners is Boston-based SatCon Technology Corp., which is supplying the systems to properly condition the power coming from an array for the grid, and Duke University professor Jeffrey Scruggs, who specializes in electromechanical vibratory systems.
Also helping Resolute turn wave power devices into wave power farms is Cliff Goudey, director of the Sea Grant Offshore Aquaculture Engineering Center at MIT. Goudey created the technology behind the “self-propelled fish cage” being developed by Ocean Farm Technologies LLC of Maine.
Staby said that connecting wave power to the grid was a priority for the company, and that the impetus behind the project is to get the use of wave power energy at a utility level as close to that already seen in the wind-power field as quickly as possible.
“Rather than trying to optimize just one of those devices, we recognized that for wave energy farms to contribute energy to the grids, we are going to need hundreds of those devices deployed offshore, not just one,” Staby said.
Getting wave energy power even to the level that wind power has reached as a part of the overall energy market will take some doing. According to a March report by analyst Marianne D’Aquila of the Wellesley-based firm BCC Research, wind produced 119,339 megawatts globally in 2008, whereas wave energy generated just 4 megawatts last year. She predicts that to increase to 122 megawatts in 2013, still just a fraction of the power produced by wind.
According to John Miller, director of the Marine Renewable Energy Center at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, such a control system is what wave energy needs to reach utility-scale production.
“The sort of negative part of most renewables is that they are intermittent, so when you are talking about managing a grid it is problematic.” Forecasting the nature of incoming waves and reacting to that forecast with a control system is critical, Miller said.
“Wave energy goes all day, but while we tend to think of it as fairly uniform, it is continuously changing. So being able to predict and tune your system to wave energy is critical to be able to maximize your power,” Miller said.
Once the Phase 1 testing is done in April 2010, Resolute will move quickly after Phase 2 funding. Staby is hopeful that it will be granted, as he sees a much bigger market for the control technology than just Resolute’s version of a wave energy converter.
“What’s interesting about the product is that it isn’t just a product for us. It’s that the end product is going to be usable by all wave energy converter companies.”
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