Entrepreneurs Riding Wave as Power Source
For the past eight years, aeronautical engineer Robert A. Bueker has been tinkering with a windmill that spins underwater, looking for a way to make electricity.
With a $70,000 matching grant from the California Energy Commission, Bueker, president of tiny Hydropower Inc. of Anaheim Hills, believes that he’s about to achieve the ancient beach-goers’ daydream of harnessing the relentless power of ocean waves.
Although such renewable energy sources as wind have progressed from the status of harebrained scheme to everyday power generator, waves have yet to be commercially developed, particularly in the United States. Yet many experts see enormous potential.
“I really don’t think it is pie-in-the-sky,” said Fred Raichlen, a Caltech professor and specialist in coastal engineering. “An analogy would be solar energy. We’re now actually extracting (solar) energy out in the desert. . . . Ten years ago we knew we could do it, but not economically.”
Since January, Bueker has been testing a small, 10-kilowatt model of his Seamill, which provides enough power to light four houses. The device consists of three 33-foot-long pipes, one inside the other, that hold a small turbine driven by the ocean swells.
“This is really simple to build; it’s not a high-tech system,” Bueker said. “So once you build it, maintenance is very low.” Bueker also points to another advantage over land-based windmills: Ocean waves can create electricity 24 hours a day, all year round.
In Japan, Scotland and Norway, much larger wave energy power plants have been built and tested. The biggest--two 1.5-megawatt plants--are under construction in Australia and Java. In other countries, wave energy research has largely been funded by government, but here most proponents are inventors and other dreamers.
“These guys are just at the beginning of a technology which, at least in the United States, has been left with the entrepreneurs,” said David Skelly, a coastal engineer at University of California Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which has been testing the Bueker invention.
“You can’t always count on inventors, but once in a while you do hit on one with a workable idea,” said William von KleinSmid, who has reviewed many wave-energy proposals over the years as supervising research engineer for Southern California Edison Co.
“We look at them very, very hard,” Von KleinSmid said, “because there is a lot of horsepower out there that could be harnessed.”
“We’re so close” to practical systems, said Skelly of Scripps. “This is a problem we can solve.”
Skelly has lately been testing two systems, the Hydropower Seamill and a design from Wave Power Inc., a small Texas company.
Stuart Pringle, an L.A.-based industrial designer and inventor, has four models of systems proposed by a family-based enterprise he formed three months ago and calls Pacific Ocean Wave Energy Research. One of these would stretch into the ocean underneath a pier.
The basic concept behind all these schemes is to capture the immense energy of waves. The principle isn’t new. The U.S. Coast Guard has for years used whistle buoys, in which the energy from waves compresses air to blow a whistle. In many proposed wave systems, the power of the swell is directed to a chamber that compresses air, or a liquid, which then turns a turbine to generate electricity.
Wave power may ultimately be best-suited to remote locations and special situations because the electricity produced could cost as much as three times that of a public utility, according to some estimates. One frequently discussed application would use wave energy on offshore desalination plants.
For instance, Southern California Edison Co. estimates that its electricity cost an average of 3.6 cents a kilowatt hour in 1990. Pringle figures his system would produce electricity at about 9 cents a kilowatt hour. On the other hand, Bueker says his Seamill can generate electricity at 1.5 to 3 cents a kilowatt hour.
Skelly sees great potential for developing nations--”it would be a lot cheaper than building the Aswan Dam”--or for such tasks as producing clean-burning hydrogen gas on otherwise abandoned offshore oil rigs.
Yet few see wave power replacing large-scale electrical generating plants.
John E. Cummings, managing executive for corporate development at Palo Alto-based Electric Power Research Institute, which studies power-generation systems for the nation’s big utilities, doubts that waves could ever be used in a commercial, bulk electric-power plant. For one thing, siting large-scale facilities on expensive and heavily regulated coastlines such as those in California would present enormous political problems.
“I had some people at MIT giving me (data on) energy density, the energy in waves,” Cummings said, “and working with that I concluded that the energy density is not powerful enough to make a power plant practical, particularly with the amount of the coastline you would need.” Cummings, an eight-year veteran of the Coast Guard, also questions whether devices can be built to withstand the storms of the unforgiving sea.
Indeed, the big technological hang-up so far has been designing devices that could even take the ordinary wear and tear and corrosiveness of the ocean environment. But the modern revolution in polymers, composites and other super-tough materials has made some proponents more optimistic that this can be done. Other inventors have turned to ingenuity.
Bueker, for instance, believes that his design may work best installed in the protection of a seawall, an idea that originated in Japan. The wall protects the turbine, which operates inside a vertical tunnel. The ocean enters nonviolently at the bottom of the tunnel.
Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the Northern California utility, is considering a test of a 100-kilowatt breakwater version of his mill near Ft. Bragg. Bueker also hopes to finish testing an open-ocean model at the end of the Scripps pier in La Jolla in the next few months.
Power From the Ocean Wave-energy promoters have come up dozens of proposed systems over the years, some stretching along coastlines, some for tethered facilities offshore and others, such as this one, to run out into the ocean underneath piers. The mechanical principle of this system this uses ocean swells to compress air to drive turbine generators.
Source: Stuart Pringle, Pacific Ocean Wave Energy Research
