The cable-laying ship, HOS Innovator. Photo: Dan Hellin
By Paul Lask
Fall/Winter 2024
About ten miles south of Newport, in the unincorporated seaside village of Seal Rock, the first grid-connected test facility for wave energy technology in the continental United States is nearing completion. Operated by PacWave, a project that resides within Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, the site has been under development for well over a decade, and is now in its final stages of construction.
Within the next 18 months, the first of four companies will voyage to an offshore site, seven miles from land, to hook up their wave energy converters (WECs), which translate the powerful movement of ocean waves into electricity. Each converter will attach to one of PacWave’s connectors, from which, like giant extension cords, four cables will run shoreward to a splice vault — 75 feet long and 10 feet deep — that was carved out of the parking lot of Driftwood Beach State Park.
The cables will then snake beneath Highway 101, under a handful of private properties, popping out at a power monitoring and conditioning center that resembles a very large four-unit storage facility.
From there the power will be sent to “the grid,” Central Lincoln County’s People’s Utility District, and then the energy harnessed from ocean waves will hypothetically power your television and charge your phone.
A brief history
The first step in the marine phase of the project was to construct conduits on the sea floor through which the cables would be run, by drilling horizontal bores 130 feet beneath the seafloor through a mile of mudstone. Using surplus conduit from an oil and gas operation in Texas, PacWave’s contractors pushed together the steel piece by piece, each section of pipe weighing about a ton.
The undersea conduit will protect the cable through the surf zone. Because the Oregon coast takes epic poundings during winter storms, and repairing a cable runs around three million dollars, PacWave — licensed to operate for 25 years — wants to assure that they and the energy companies they are working with are set up for success.
Where the conduit ends offshore, a large remotely operated vehicle (ROV) used jets to cut seafloor trenches, upon which the heavily armored cables will rest. At the end of each cable is a plug, or subsea connector, the company will hook its WEC to.
Once this offshore prep work was complete, the contractors turned around and began drilling small tunnels underground to bring cables to the power conditioning and monitoring building a few blocks from the ocean.
Now that all the boring, trenching and drilling is complete, installation of the cables has begun.
Dan Hellin
24 hours a day
While the engineering and installation of the wave testing facility may seem simple on paper, implementing the buildout is anything but.
Consider a day in early August when the crew engaged in sea trials (dry runs) aboard the HOS Innovator, the 240-foot multi-purpose service vessel from which PacWave is laying its cables. A sea trial allows the crew to lock in communications and equipment function before starting the actual installation of the first subsea cable.
As PacWave Director Dan Hellin describes it, of the 39 people on board there are “Fourteen officers and crew from Hornbeck Offshore Services (the company that owns and operates the Innovator), an excellent three-person catering team, and 20 of us that make up the project team.”
Project team members include a mishmash of technicians, engineers, and scientists from companies including RT Casey, Tetra Tech, Reliant Robotics, Vision Subsea and Sause Marine Services. There are also observers from Makai Ocean Engineering and PacWave.
The remotely operated vehicle (or ROV) that will help guide the cable into the conduit is tended to by six people alone. They are bunkered inside a converted shipping container stuffed with computers and technical gear, part situation room, part high stakes video game, all under the umbrella of the very real 100 million dollar price tag of the overall project.
After the dry run a team of divers aboard another ship gets in the water. They open the first conduit and began preparing a “messenger wire” to be intercepted by the Innovator. This wire is attached to a “recovery wire” connected to a winch on deck. Another winch over in the parking lot of Driftwood Beach retrieves the recovery wire, which they attach to a heavier wire called a “pulling wire.” The pulling wire is then fed back through the conduit to the ship, where it is supposed to be attached to the subsea cable.
They got about 95% of the recovery wire through when it snapped.
Beginning again the following day, they hit what Hellin describes as “a milestone”: the pulling of the first subsea cable off the Innovator into the sea.
Operations like this run 24 hours a day.
The Valley of Death
Hellin reminds me as we walk around the construction site that each of the four wave energy companies would be competing. He explains how PacWave will help usher these companies through the “valley of death,” a business term for how young companies can go belly up.
In the first stages of technology development there is funding and excitement. A wave energy company, say, is flush with research and development cash. The early startup phase is a giddy, hopeful time.
But soon the company hits the valley floor, the precommercial, testing stage. They often need more time and equipment but have burned through their R&D surplus, perhaps delaying tests and missing grants. Investors naturally want to fund a product that has proven value, but it’s hard for the company to provide that proof. Traditionally this is where companies drown.
PacWave, a nonprofit funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, is providing the first-of-its-kind infrastructure and support to get companies over this hurdle. PacWave can help companies keep their converters generating power for years in an attempt to show investors that wave energy is a viable option.
Perils amid promise
Because there’s basically no commercial wave energy being used at the moment, Hellin says, there are a fair number of unknowns in the field.
Some critical question marks are survivability and maintenance. Will years of twenty-foot seas destroy cables? How often will the machines break down? This is arguably why Oregon is a great proving ground for wave power — if a WEC can survive here, it should be able to do so in most places.
Hellin explained that if, and it’s quite an if, the four companies were producing the maximum power they’ve been licensed, roughly half of Lincoln County’s 20,000 homes could potentially run off waves.
“That would be nice,” he said, but how much electricity can actually be harnessed and redistributed is still up in the air.
Another unknown relates to the adaptive management framework PacWave is working under — though they don’t anticipate running into environmental issues, and though they planned their routing to be minimally impactful, they are mandated to adapt their operations if they run into problems.
Then there are the WECs. Some are enormous, over two thousand tons. One, the Pelamis, is a four-segment “sausage” that clocks in at over five hundred feet in length. Anchors can weigh a hundred tons.
The technologies’ impermanence makes for a steep learning curve for the PacWave team.
“How we actually do this,” Hellin says, remains to be seen.
The switch gear room
Each bay in the land-side facility connects to the switch gear room, considered a public utility substation, and as such a highly secured space.
“Pretty much no one is coming in here,” Hellin says as we enter.
It looks like a suburban garage with metal shelving against the walls and thick plastic pipes sticking up at random. A worker’s hot sauce was on top of a microwave near the north wall. Obviously far from completion, once finished this space will be where the power produced at sea will collectively live.
To clarify the risk of being in the switch gear room once it’s active, Hellin notes that an electric wire thrumming above Highway 101 would kill me instantly if I were to touch it. The power that will gather here will be three times that.
We moved on.
A nomadic building
The control building is the only one on site that is wood framed. An airier space than the facility’s other pre-engineered metal buildings, the control building is where politicians, funders and other important people will gather.
An energy-efficient facade of transparent panels from a company called Kalwal graces the control building and the top of the bays, reminding me of rice paper windows. Kalwall has coined the term “museum-quality daylight” to describe the effect of their product, panels that are rated as durable and highly insulating as a wall.
Each WEC-development company will have its own strategy room with a data rack, though many will be controlling their project from elsewhere in the country or the world. There will be a restroom with a shower and nice patio with plants out back. However, it is being designed as temporary rather than permanent office space. HGE architect Joe Slack described the building as “nomadic.”
It is an apt term for the ebb and flow of companies Hellin believes will come and go over the years.
On our way to out to our cars, we pass a huge crane. It’s cheaper to keep the crane onsite than to repeatedly call it in from elsewhere, which would likely cause delays. Moving the lid of the cable vault out of the way means lifting a 37,000-pound item, while the spools of cable also run in the thousands of pounds.
“People don’t comprehend the scale,” Hellin says before we drove down to the shoreside site.
Back at Driftwood Beach State Park
Under blue skies a gentle breeze wafts the scent of diesel from a large winch atop a flatbed truck. Safety tape and a chain link fence cordons off the ten-foot-deep vaults carved out of the Driftwood Beach parking lot. This is the splice vault, where the offshore cables will meet the on-land cables.
Another crane looms nearby, helpful to move vault lids that clocked in a little lighter than the one up the hill—only 18,000 pounds apiece.
Two giant tanks of fresh water sit at the edge of the site. The water is for flushing the conduits as the cables are fed into them, assuring debris won’t gum up the process.
Nothing about this project is simple or cheap, Hellin explains.
Despite the cost, hiccups and unknowns, Hellin seems genuinely excited about the operation. His science background gives him an air of curiosity—he simply wants to get this thing up and running to see whether or not wave energy is going to be a practical renewable. As we wind down the tour, two women ask for a moment of his time.
They are Seal Rock locals, and they had been tracking the progress of the Innovator as it made its way through the Panama Canal some weeks earlier.
“You should let people know this is happening in Seal Rock,” one said.
Agreeing that their town deserves to be on the map of a potential breakthrough in clean energy, Hellin explains the progress so far, his excitement matching theirs against the backdrop of humming machines.
Read more of freelance writer Paul Lask’s work at prlask.com.
Undersea cable awaiting deployment for PacWave. Photo: Mark Farley
