Dreams of harnessing wave energy off the Oregon coast just became a little more real today.
Ocean Power Technologies has applied for a full license to build and operate a 1.5 megawatt commercial wave energy project near Reedsport. Plans include 10 wave energy buoys, in a quarter square mile of ocean, almost three miles off the coast. The first buoy could be deployed late this year and work on installing the rest of them could be underway by fall of 2011.
OPT appears to be on track for building not just the first wave energy park in Oregon, but also along the West Coast.
Plans For Growth
Looking further into the future, OPT is still eyeing plans for a major expansion. In the application the company says it anticipates submitting a new application to grow the wave energy park from 10 buoys to 100 buoys. If fully built, it would be capable of producing 50 megawatts of power. This larger project would cover an area approximately 5 miles long and about 330 yards wide.
We all want ocean power to be a big success but there are reasons to be cautious. Off shore Oregon is a key route for migrating whales. The ocean energy proposals want to locate where they can optimize the energy capture and still have easy access to equipment from shore. This energy “sweet spot” appears to overlap the primary whale migration zone.
Exacerbating the problem is the fact that the buoys exert such strong forces on their anchor cables that the engineers seek to distribute the load among three anchor cables stretched horizontally in the middle of the water column. This means that there are 3X more ways for whales to become entangled.
Filter feeding whales feed by swimming with their mouths open and if they become entangled, they do not have a reverse gear, so they try to free themselves by twisting their whole bodies which might work great when they are trying to free themselves from kelp, but not when they are tangled in wire rope.
I am not aware of any hazing or deterrent that will prevent adverse interactions between whales and ocean energy projects.
Sincerely hoping for answers.
It looks like your questions have been answered in a follow-up article.
http://www.naturaloregon.org/2010/02/02/the-deal-that-may-seal-wave-power-for-reedsport/