Tests in gaining energy from waves OK’d

PORTLAND – Federal authorities have given tentative approval for tests that could lead to a system of buoys to harness the energy of waves to generate electricity off the coast of Oregon.

The preliminary permit, among the first of its kind granted by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, will allow the Finavera company to begin to analyze the environmental and economic impact of the proposed buoys.

“The Coos County project is part of the next step along our path to the commercialization of wave energy,” said Alla Weinstein, an executive of Finavera, an Irish company that was granted the preliminary permit on April 30.

Finavera has been working with researchers at Oregon State University to develop what it calls Aquabuoy wave energy devices.

If completed, company officials say, the project would be built off Bandon, and could have a generating capacity of 100 megawatts, enough to power 15,000 homes. That is considerably larger than a similar project already built off the coast of Portugal, using a different buoy technology to generate about 20 megawatts of power.

The preliminary permit is “good news for the industry and good news for Finavera. We need to get projects into the water,” said Sean O’Neill, president of the Ocean Renewable Energy Coalition, a trade association based in Darnestown, Md., near Washington, D.C.

Despite their potential to provide a renewable supply of electricity, wave energy projects in the United States are still years from providing commercial power, said Roger Bedard, of the Electrical Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, Calif.

The federal permit gives Finavera and its associates a year to propose myriad studies to help clear the complex of state and U.S. regulations.

The next major step will be stationing a single experimental buoy off Newport, along the Oregon coast 122 miles north of Bandon, sometime this summer, Finavera said in an announcement.

After that, Bedard said, the company can expect to spend a year getting approval for a range of environmental and economic impact studies, two years to conduct them, and then FERC can take up to two years to weigh the application for Finavera to actually deploy the buoy network.

“And it will take another year to get real hardware in the water. We’re talking seven years to put it in the water,” Bedard said.

Bedard and O’Neill advocate a more streamlined process for licensing ocean energy.

“For me it is the right thing for our country to do,” said Bedard. “We can have clean, renewable energy.”