Turning Waves Into Electricity

Published Jan 12, 2023, 5:05 AM

Tim Mundon is chief technology officer at Oscilla Power. Tim's problem is this: How do you turn waves into electrical power?

You can see the power of the ocean in every wave, but the complex churm and swirl of the surf has made it difficult to translate that movement into something useful. Tim Mundon and his colleagues have been working on the problem for more than a decade, and are about to test a new electric generator in the big waves off the coast of Oahu. 

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Pushkin. Solar power and wind power are amazing, but and we talked about this recently on the show, they have this major flaw. They're intermittent. The sun doesn't always shine, the wind doesn't always blow. This is a fact you might reflect on as you are gazing out at some majestic vista, maybe you're on a bluff overlooking the sea, and then you notice something. The waves they never stop. They may be bigger or smaller, but they're always there. If only there were some way to capture the energy that is right there in those waves. This is not a new idea. People have wanted to do this for literally hundreds of years. Unfortunately, though, it's not as easy as it sounds. There are a lot of problems to solve. But sometime, probably in the next few weeks, a tugboat will pull a yellow, thirty foot long wave energy converter out of Honolulu Harbor and around to a mooring on the north shore of Oahu. They're a crew of engineers will basically plug this thing into a cable on the ocean floor, and if everything goes according to plan, it will start producing electricity. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is what's your problem. My guest today is Tim Munden, chief technology officer at Oscilla Power. Tim's problem is this, how do you turn the waves in the ocean into electrical power. One of the interesting things to me about your field is it seems really hard, right. I mean, it's been this period, the twenty or so year as you've been in the field, it seems like wave powers has been like one challenge after another. I don't know. I mean, this is me not knowing much about it, but well, you know that's true. But it's not just since I've been in the field. It's been a lot longer than that. I mean, the first pattern on wave energy is was filed in I think seventeen ninety nine, which is kind of crazy. Really Yeah. I think a lot of the challenge comes from the fact that when you look into the ocean, you think, well, that's pretty straightforward. The waves just move up and down. We can just put something on it to be able to harness that energy, and you can all that energy is right there, you can see it where the water moves up and down. Right, But there are fundamental challenges that make that. We found that mean that that's not quite so straightforward. You know, you could create this long list, but in essence, there's a massive amount of energy in a relatively small space. It's the power density, and because it's so high and much higher than wind or solar, that it has a tendency to break things. And so you're not only to have to have something that's think efficient, but you also have to have some thing that's strong, and oftentimes those are in conflict with each other. Interesting, so if you build something that's tough enough to float out there in the waves and survive, it's not as good as capturing the energy and vice versa. Well, yeah, that's precisely correct. And so is there an underlying problem there that's a problem for anybody trying to turn ocean waves into electrical power, which is that the ocean moves in all different directions. It moves in threedom, up and down and side to side, and that's way more complicated than like having a windmill and the wind blows into it and it turns like, is that a starting problem is that the motion is in kind of all different directions in the ocean. That's exactly right. Yeah, it's more than that as well, And maybe maybe we can kind of simplify it in many ways. It's it is that energy doesn't flow in a linear fashion. It moves in a very different way. It actually moves in the particles. Ocean particles move in circles, so you don't have this linear flow particles like you would in wind. And so that's that's the first big problem. The second big problem as well is you know it's much denser, and so you have this you know, you have to manage that that high power density as well, and it also high variability as well. On a very short time frame. Now, over longer time periods, waves are extremely consistent, you know, we have it's much more consistent than wind or solar. But over the course of a few seconds, you know, waves change quite a lot and you have to factor all of that into that capture part of the system. So, I know, you have these two different sort of models, these two different wave power generators. You're working on ones called the traiton. See it's a big one in a little one. It's the little one that's that's further along. That's the one in Honolulu right now, When exactly is that one going to be installed, going to be turned on? It's a really good question. We're currently waiting for. Were the windows. The site that we're using is it's a it's an energetic site, so the waves are big, which mean that it can sometimes be challenging for the sort of construction operations that need to go in order to make the site ready. And so we're waiting for the right window to be able to take that system around around Hawaii from Honolulu to Knahowe, which is on the north side of the island. So is that like next few weeks, next few months. Honestly, we're hoping that it is in the next few weeks. So let's talk. I know this is a smaller one and will that be the first real world, you know, out there generating power thing for you guys, for us, that's right, that'll be our first commercial type unit that will be plugged into the grid and generating power. We've done other ocean deployments before this point in order to be able to demonstrate elements of the technology. We've previously deployed out in New Hampshire and done ocean deployments there where we've been able to look at specific elements and prove that they work. But this will be the first integrated complete system connected to the grid. So let's talk about the device. The Traton is the little one that traton, see is the big one that traiton see sorry, the little one is the Triton. See. It's really innovatively named for the sea to stand for community. Yeah, we could, we could, we could have come up with something a little bit more exciting, but no, Triton is the name of the larger system. Triton is good. Trayton is very exciting. I think staying with that is smart. So this thing that is sitting there in Honolulu right now, that's about to get towed out and plugged in, for lack of a better word, tell me just what does it look like? How big is it? Of course, so that the Triton architecture, which all of our systems follow, comprises a floating object on the surface, a hole. Hanging beneath that hole is a ring that stays very still while the surface float is being moved by waves, and then those the relative motion of those two bodies is what generates power. So there's there's the piece that floats on the surface. The ones I've seen in pictures are yellow, just to help picture it right. And that's floating there on the surface, and there are a few was it three or four cables going down from the surface connecting to this ring that is suspended under the water below the floating part of the trayton, Right, that's correct. And because there are three lines that connect the float to the ring, all the motions that the that the waves move the float with translate into relative motion and that's what generates power. So let's talk that through a little bit. So you've got the three lines connecting the ring under the water to the thing floating, and what you're saying is when the when everything is floating side to side or kind of back and forth, that's all generating power. Right, So how does that work? What's actually happening? So what you say is absolutely correct. So all of that generates relative motion between the two bodies. So in the trayton ce that causes a drum to rotate that trum, that rotation of that drum turns a generator. It's quite straightforward. And that's all inside. That's all inside the thing that's floating on the surface. That's correct. The drum and the generator, that's all inside the floating thing. Yeah, that's right. So it all. It all happens inside there. There's a obviously there's power electronics, and there's electrical power systems that allow us to take that power and move it outside of the float. And there's just a cable that what runs under the ocean sea floor something. There's a line running from the from the triton to the floor to a cable. Yeah, it's basically it's almost as simple as that. Slightly slightly more involved, but not much more. Honestly, you would have it. It's actually no different than what would be done for off your wind project. They lay cables along the sea floor, they have an interconnection point, and then there's a cable that goes from our device down to the sea floor to connect into it. It's pretty straightforward. It's been done for many years. And so the triton, see the smaller one that's about to be deployed. How big is it? How big is the part that floats on the surface. It's ten meters long, which I think is about thirty feet. There are thirty plus fe okay, so pretty big, not that little. Yeah, and there's there's there's obviously space inside for all of the equipment, plus engineers themselves, obviously, you know, any access would be for maintenance. So this thing is there in Honolulu Harbor sort of any data. It sort of reminds me of like a rocket launch, right when they when they got the rocket ready to launch, and they're just waiting for everything to come into line right leg, and they put it off and they wait and then they do it. So this thing that's going to happen any day, a ship is going to tow the trade and see out to see and hook it up. Basically, literally all that is needed is that tugboat will come hook up to the system, it will tow it to the site, we'll attach the moorings, and then it will be ready to go. It really just it's quite straightforward, but it is obviously requires certain CEA states. It couldn't go out in the highest waves because when you're towing something, you wouldn't want you any enormous storm to be breaking those toe lines and things like that, so there is a particular limit to that installation. Is there already a power line you know on the sea floor there? How does that piece of it work? Yeah, that's right. That's one of the main reasons why we're going here is because This is what's called the Wave Energy Test site. Again, it's another really interesting acronym. You know, WETS is what it's known as. And here is a good acronym. Here is a good acronym for a testing way. And there are other test sites as well, but for the moment, this is the main one in the US. So they already have a subseat cable. They have three berths, and so we're going into one that's thirty meters of water depth. And yes, it has a submarine cable coming out to it. And the idea is that the device, the tread and c will start generating power immediately. Tow it out, that's correct, plug it in, turn it on like a like a lamp. Yes, actually it is as simple as that. In a minute, how do we get from plugging in a prototype in Hawaii to wave generated power at scale? That's the end of the ads. Now we're going back to the show. Given that you're just now, you know, out in the real ocean for the first time. The thing I'm thinking about, given this conversation is like, oh, how how long is it going to last? How often is it going to break? Right? Like? These seem like super hard things you're just going to have to figure out by having your by having your products out in the ocean and having a break and understanding how they break and how to make them break less. And that's exactly right. We can only do so much, and yes, the whole point in testing is to be able to evaluate it. The ocean is an extremely harsh environment, you know. The sea water itself is you know, terrible on metal components, and we're trying to look at minimizing that there's fouling, which is there. There's all these lists of challenges that we spent a lot of time trying to mit to to this point, but we won't really know the impact unless we can take some solid, long duration time in the water, and that's where we're at right now. That being said, there is an enormous amount of experience within just companies in the marine space that have solved these challenges before. So half of the battle is finding out what the challenge is and then we can kind of reach out to these people to solve it. As we figure out what's going to break and then figure out who's fixed similar problems in the past, figure out how this sex. Yeah, and you mentioned that it's at a test site. Is the sole purpose of this just to see if it works or does it have some additional function besides the sort of research piece. So we have hopes for what we can do with it after we complete this testing, although that's still to be determined, and so we're going to be testing it, checking everything is exactly as we intend it to be, and then once that testing is complete, the intent or the hope is to bring it back to Washington State where we can have it generate power to a native or tribal community, ideally somewhere in Washington. Is there any particular reason that a native or tribal community is the optimal use case. Well, the Triton Sea itself is intended for one of two different markets. The community remote isolated communities, and in many cases these tribal communities are very isolated, they don't have good energy security, so this is an ideal solution for those that are on the coast. There is also the possibility for power at sea applications where you can provide power remote locations, very remote at sea locations where there are no other sources of power, so it might be a substitute for like places where the power goes off and people use gas generators regularly. Like it's sort of like instead of having to use the gas generator, you can use ther and see, is it something like that? Is it that kind of am I think of the right scale? If I'm thinking that way, you are think thinking about it in the right way, especially when you consider that in many remote communities, getting fuel to these communities is absolutely critical. Yeah, you know, they can't always you know, you could be on an island somewhere, they could be you know, in remote Alaska. You know, just the cost of fuel transport is an order of magnitude more than the cost of the fuel itself, and so the actual cost of power generation in those places is exceptionally high. And it's also a very inefficient way to get power, right, burning fuel and a fuel generator is it's costly, and it's has a big carbon footprint, right, it has a big carbon footprint. That's correct for us. The goal here is is really doing that at a large scale. So you know, these small communities can be a real can benefit quite a lot from this technology, but we can all benefit a lot from being able to scale this up to multi mega systems. When you think kind of looking out further into the future, about getting from where you are now to having tritans, you know, a thousand full scale tritans floating in the ocean, generating real power, you know, at real scale. Like I'm sure there's a million things you have to figure out, But are there a few big, big questions, big problems in your head of things you have to solve to get from here to there? Not as many as you might think. One of our biggest challenges is that the manufacturing scale up. But much of the technology is resolved at this point. You know, we have an architecture that works, We have a system designed that works, and one of the key things with our approach is that it's scalable. We have one system that generates one megawat, you therefore have two systems they generate two megawords, and then you just you literally just keep adding it. And there are a few other companies doing what you're doing right at these government sites. As you said, there a few different berths. When you're when you're tray and see gets towed out in Hawaii, will there be other companies devices products floating out there next to it. Probably not, but we do have other competitors, colleagues really because we're all in the space together who are also working on the problem. At this point. The other company that will be going out at a similar time is a company called Seapower, And there's also another US company that did a deployment who are at a maybe slightly earlier stage called cal Wave that are based down in California. And we're all working together, but we're all working together to solve the same problem, and I think ultimately in the in the future we will all be having part of the of the overall mix. There be different solutions for different locations. So you've been in this field for twenty plus years, that makes been a time. So sorry, I've been in my field plus years as well, and I'm not about to deploy something in Hawaii, So you got that going for you. You know, it's been a time when there has been this incredible growth in solar and wind power. It seems like wave power has been much harder, and I'm curious. I'm curious how that's been for you. I mean, has it been harder than you expected? Do you feel like you have lessons from it? You know, that's a it's a really good question. That I haven't really thought of it in that way before. It's been frustrating in many ways because you can see the amount of funding and progress that's going into wind and the scale up that's been achieved. But on the other hand, it also shows what we can achieve. So in some ways it's a little frustrating when you see the amount of money that's gone into it and the fact that we are a little bit further behind, and that we do have a much more difficult technology challenge to solve. On the other hand, once we solve it, than we have you know, a huge potential market. You got the whole ocean. There's wave all the time everywhere, right, that's right. Especially you know if you look at where the majority of cities are, they're on coastlines, and so you can actually install wave energy converters in locations that are close to load. That has other significant advantages. We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. Now let's get back to what's your problem. Let's finish with the lightning round. What's one thing that's surprising about waves that most people don't know that they don't flow like water. The individual wave particle moves around in a circle. That if you actually go out into the ocean and you put something down on the surface of the water, it doesn't flow along with the waves. It actually moves around in a circle. And so it's only the energy that moves along with the waves, not the actual water particles. I also learned from your LinkedIn page that you were the archery club captain in grad school. Yeah, do you still what do you say do archery? I don't even know the verb? Do you still arch? I do shoot sometimes? Do you still shoot? Yes? I do? And I have been I think now for you know, since I've been eighteen months old. It's always been a thing I kind of did you say, since you've been eighteen months old? I did? Actually, yes I have. There's actually a photograph of my a baby with the moment probably probably not but seven days exactly exactly. Now you've told everybody how old I am. But yeah, So I've done archery for you know, thirty forty years basically, And it's what is it about archery? What is it about archery that keeps you doing it? Why do you love it? Um? You know, part of it is the fact that you do it for a long time. So you get better at it, you get good at it, and therefore you like being good at something, and so therefore you can continue to be good at it. And I've been lucky enough to represent the national team for a number of years, and so you do it because of that. Also part of it is that just there's a lot of a certain amount of joy in shooting an arrow. You have a favorite mythological archer you honestly, the way the way it's always conveyed in books and in fiction, it's always frustrating. You're like, no, that's not how you do it, and it's like screaming at the TV or various things. It's like, what is going on here? What's one piece of advice you'd give to someone trying to solve a hard problem. I think you've got to persevere, basically, but you've also got to go back to first principles. You know sometimes that you won't. You'll come across something that's that's seemingly intractable, and then you sure perseverance is extremely important, but sometimes you have to take a step back, look at first principles, look at what other people have done, and then come at it again, maybe this time from a different angle. That's probably one bit of advice. Tell me a little more about perseverance, Like in your particular case, right, you've been working on this for a long time. Is there something about you? Is there something about the problem? Like how have you hung in there for so long? Oh, that's a good question. Actually, I'm not even sure I have a great answer for that, but I would say that I really enjoy it. I really enjoy creating something in the sense that you have multiple problems here, and then you can, if you approach it correctly, you can break those down into individual parts, and then you can solve those independently, and then you can share that knowledge. And so being able to publish and share that knowledge and discuss it and help and then use that and what other people have done in order to solve a subsequent problem, that's invigorating. I think that's one of the reasons why I kept involved in this, and also because I believe right now the end is in sights. You know, we are close to being able to create a commercial system, and to be part of that is fantastic. Tim Munden is the chief technical officer of Ossula Power

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