Through years of innovation, wave power is taking shape in Hawaiʻi's open water.
Patrick Cross, the University of Hawaiʻi's ocean energy program manager, has been working for the last decade or so to develop this renewable energy source.
The Wave Energy Test Site off Marine Corps Base Hawaiʻi in Kāneʻohe is funded by the Navy. If all goes as planned, Cross and his team hope to begin producing power for the military and hooking up to the energy grid as soon as next month.
"In October, it looks like we're gearing up now for making that device operational, which means picking up our shore cable from the seabed and connecting in their 'umbilical-cable,' as we call it, and splicing that in, and then the device would actually be sending power onshore to the Marine Corps Base grid, and thus to the HECO Oʻahu power grid," Cross told HPR.
He said this is the first time the OE-35 device by OceanEnergy would be sending any meaningful power ashore to the grid from the test site.
"It's currently the largest deployed in the world right now, and it has a 500 kilowatt turbine on it — that's its peak capacity. It'll, in general, produce less than that. And that may not sound a lot compared to, you know, many megawatt wind turbines and stuff, but it is a step forward in large-scale wave energy generation," Cross said.
The military has been looking at this wave conversion technology for some 20 years. It's far from perfect, but the possibilities are limitless.
Also in the works is an electric charging station on the open ocean for autonomous vehicles to pull in and juice up.
This interview aired on The Conversation on Sept. 19, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
