WaveEnergy A future powersource for your port

By Diane Mettler

Background
The groundbreaking technology is a spinoff of research conducted by Protean’s President, Sean Moore, while he was studying for his PhD in engineering.

“I found that wave energy was more than just a place of opportunity; [the ocean] ultimately has the largest amount of concentrated renewable energy,” said Moore.

Moore also discovered that to-date no one had been able to cost-effectively extract wave energy, due to several obstacles, including:

• Multidirectional. Today’s wave energy converters require that waves come from a particular direction. A successful converter would need to be able to extract energy from waves coming from various directions.

• Multiple frequencies. Many of the current converters only work well with specific frequencies, like an 8-second wave or a 10-second wave. “You have to be able to work with what the ocean is delivering to you and in engineering terms, that’s actually very difficult to do,” says Moore.

• Robust. It should be able to survive the storms and the harsh environment.

• Efficient. Ideally it should extract a energy when there is very little available.

The way you produce a competitive energy source, said Moore, is to make your performance high and your costs low. “Energy in waves in far more dense than wind — easily by a factor of 100. As wave technology matures and enters into commercialization; it has a really serious chance of providing large amounts of energy at very cost effective-prices.”

The answer
After over three years of R&D, Moore has developed a converter that meets all the requirements. Trials have been conducted and the results are, in Moore’s words: “extremely good”.

“We’re now refining the device, looking for places where we can deploy it in Western Australia, and Hawaii and California,” he said.
Simply stated, the Protean™ Wave Energy technology is a unique wave buoy or point absorber. Moored to the ocean floor, the slightest movement of the Protean™ Wave Energy buoy at the surface drives an electric generator; this electricity is then transmitted to shore via cables running along the ocean floor.

The Protean buoy can be moored at any depth, but the deeper you go the more energy there is available. The small commercial device will have a peak output of about 75 kW, and an expected reliable (base load) output of approximately 25 kW (based on the average wave availability worldwide).

The device is omni-directional. “It doesn’t matter where the wave is coming from. It will work just as well if the wave comes from the front, and then the next wave comes from behind,” said Moore.

Bonus features
The wave converter is just a piece of the bigger picture. It can also be configured with a wind turbine and a desalination unit as well.

“Our system was originally designed as a generic platform and we can then add anything we want to the top of it,” says Moore. “The one thing that seems to be quite pertinent, especially for a port, is a wind turbine sitting on top of the buoy. So we would have potentially a wind and wave system all in the one device.”

As for the built-in desalination unit, Protean uses an ordinary, off-the-shelf desalination system. “It takes the seawater, uses the wave energy to turn that into fresh water, and then we just pump that fresh water back to shore.”

Benefits for ports
The wave technology is an ideal fit for energy-demanding ports and they would experience a variety of benefits:

• Maximum energy production from deep or near-shore waters

• Zero emissions and contaminants

• Low costs

In the very near future ports will be able to test the system. If ports are pleased with the output, they can purchase and rollout out a larger system.

Protean is keeping the cost for testing very affordable. “We want them to know it will work for them. Otherwise they are buying a large and expensive ‘hood ornament’,” said Moore. “If it works, they can look at leasing or implementing a much larger array of the devices to meet their power requirements.”

Next time you see those waves crashing, they might just be helping power your port.

In This Issue

Up Front

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Bulk Up

Ports & infrastructure
Port of Seattle nets new container business

Clean trucks at your ports: How to pay for them?

Port Product Review
Project cargo equipment

Commentary
Are we thinking inside or outside the box?

On the horizon: Wave Energy - A future power source for your port

Casualties