Sea Power
OSU engineers are working with coastal communities to tap offshore energy.
Terra Up Close
Annette von Jouanne and Alan Wallace:
Water as Destiny
There's something serendipitous, almost poetic, about von Jouanne's work in wave energy…Wallace, like von Jouanne, was the child of an engineer and grew up taking apart household appliances. Although his hometown of Sheffield is landlocked, Wallace notes that "no place in England is very far from the sea."
The mill is silent now, and still. When International Paper succumbed to the slump in logging a few years ago and shut the doors on a plant that had once employed 650 in Gardiner and neighboring Reedsport, commerce in the coastal Oregon communities took a body blow.
The pain of the mill closure was compounded by catches of coho salmon that had been dwindling for a decade. As loggers knocked the mud off their caulk boots for the last time and fishermen let their commercial licenses lapse, families drifted away. Schools lost students. Today, Reedsport's many boarded-up storefronts signal a community in distress.
The town sits back from the open ocean, snug against the sheltering hills of the Coast Range and wrapped inside the arc of sand that forms Winchester Bay. But out beyond the bay, past the bar, churns the constant, unceasing movement of what could someday stanch the decline of this place: Pacific Ocean waves. That's because a team of Oregon State University researchers has been inventing devices for creating electricity — clean, renewable, low-impact energy — from the motion of the ocean. And they've zeroed in on Reedsport as the "sweet spot" for testing and demonstrating new technologies — in part because the old mill's power substation, now sitting idle, could quickly be reengaged and once again buzz with electricity. Just a tiny fraction of the energy contained in the Earth's seas — their currents, tides, waves, and heat — could power the entire planet. Tom Tymchuk is awe-struck by the statistic. "If you could harness even 1 percent of ocean energy, you could light up the world," says the Central Lincoln Public Utility District board member, struggling to take in the enormity of that idea. "Light up the world!"
Compared to wind — the current frontrunner in renewables — waves are a lot more efficient. That's because of what OSU electrical engineer Annette von Jouanne calls "energy density." "Water is about 1,000 times more dense than air," she points out. "That means you can extract more power from a smaller volume, which in turn means lower cost." Besides, waves roll in with a lot more regularity than wind blows. Energy is available from waves upward of 80 percent of the time, compared to 45 percent or less from wind, leading to more efficient scheduling for other energy sources on the grid.
More than 20 agencies, including the Oregon and U.S. departments of energy, are backing OSU's initiative to launch a U.S. Ocean Wave Energy Research, Development and Demonstration Center to create and test wave-power technologies. With members of Oregon's congressional delegation strongly behind the initiative, it's quite possible that the roar of the surf and the tang of salt spray could someday replace the kthunk-kthunk of the mill and the acrid smell of pulp as the sounds and smells of prosperity in Reedsport and other sagging economies up and down the coast.
