The U.S. Department of Energy is helping wave power technology company
Resolute Marine Energy Inc. move ocean power up to the industrial level.
Bill Staby says the next step for Resolute Marine is moving toward the grid.
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.” http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2009/06/15/weekly13-DOE-doles-out-SBIR-grant-for-wave-power-development.html
