Terra

Sea Power

Terra Up Close

Wave Power Prototypes

OSU's "direct-drive" buoy approaches allow electrical generators to respond directly to ocean waves. Inside the Permanent Magnet Linear Generator Buoy, wave motion causes specially designed electrical coils to move through a magnetic field, inducing voltages and generating electricity.

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Nudge to the Future

Reedsport faces the same hard reality confronting rural communities everywhere. It's what Furman calls the "biopolitics" of resource management, the eternal tension between consumption and conservation. But just as farmers have found new possibilities in the wind that once blew unnoticed across the land — now leasing easements to utilities for wind-powered turbines — so, too, residents in coastal communities are discovering unimagined potentials in their oceans. Beach towns like Reedsport are being nudged toward the cutting edge of energy technology. The residents who have stayed on here — tough, rooted, doggedly optimistic people like Tom Tymchuk — are tapping into the resilience and the ingenuity that sustain communities through tough times. Those resources, anyway, are not in short supply around here.

Meanwhile, von Jouanne, Wallace and their team of enthusiastic undergraduate and graduate students are immersed in computer models and wave tanks, teasing out the mysteries of wave energy in their labs. OSU's College of Engineering is seeking $3 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to build the national wave energy research center, where the engineers hope to test not only their own designs but those of other researchers and commercial developers. In just a few years, the nation's first large commercial wave park could be generating ocean-based power and science in the offshore swells of Reedsport, Oregon.