Marine Renewable Energy and the Blue Economy

Marine Renewable Energy and the Blue Economy

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Everyone. Welcome to canals, Brown Bag today. We have two great speakers first up is Carrie, Tomas. Um she. Is jazz neat Tinky knows fellow at the water. Power technologies, office in the US Department, of Energy where she works as a marine science analyst and interagency coordinator, before. Deep joining do-e she. Worked as a research fellow at the National Council for public-private. Partnerships. A DC based nonprofit. That, educates about, successful. Public-private. Partnership, models she, graduated with her master's from, the School of Marine Environmental, Affairs at, the University of Washington after, after. Graduating, Phi, Beta Kappa from, Wittenberg. University with. A degree in biology. So. Excited have you here. Alright. Hi everybody, um like, Emily said my name is Kerry schnoz Mikasa, fellow at the water power office at Department of Energy and today. I'll be talking about marine renewable energy, and its role in powering, the blue economy. Alright. Before I get started I just want to give you a quick overview of what I'll be talking about today I'm, gonna, start with the water Power Technologies office and what it is and what we do and. I'll move on to the current state of marine renewable energy, and include. Some information about, the resources, around. The globe then. We'll move into talking about the blue economy excluding. What that is and what it means for marine, renewable energy, as well. As how, do ii is envisioning, the, water powers office, role, in the, blue economy after. That if I have some time we'll touch on some other projects, of interest. So. The water Power Technologies office is in the, energy efficiency and renewable energy part, of gue we. Our work is focused, around three, main buckets the. First is investing, in early-stage research to. Accelerate development. Of innovative water power technologies, while. Ensuring that long-term sustainability, and environmental, issues are addressed. Second. We validate performance, and grid reliability for, these devices, that means just making sure that they work the way they should and they're, reliable enough to be plugged into the Continental. We're. Also, support. Efforts to develop and increase accessibility, to, testing infrastructure, right. Now we're working on a really exciting project it's a wave, testing, site off the coast of Oregon called, pack wave that's, going to be opening in 2021, or 2022, so, include some more information about that later in the presentation, and, finally. We aggregate analyze, and disseminate, technical. Information, on water power technologies, as well as related issues to stakeholders and decision-makers and so, here I have a screen shot of the chosen 16, state of the science report I'll get more and detail, about their support a little bit later but it's a report that details all the potential, environmental interactions. Of marine renewable energy and. That's something that's really important. To our portfolio. Diving. In a little more to what the water Power Technologies office does we, have two main portfolios, the, first is hydropower I don't, work very closely with the hydropower portfolio, so I've included some examples, of, activities. That the hydropower folks. Are working on that. Includes upgrades, for existing hydropower as well as new low impact projects, and. Something that I think is especially exciting that they're working on it's, called pump storage it's kind of like using water as a giant battery if. You're interested in learning more about that and PR did a really wonderful story, on this so. I'd encourage you to check it out if you want to learn more, but. This presentation is going to be focused mostly on marine, energy which is a portfolio I work most closely with and that, is just getting energy from the ocean and current rivers, and, so that includes rave wave, tidal. Currents, river currents, and ocean, currents so I'll be talking about each of those in a little more depth later on. To. Give you a little more context, on the water power office you can include some information about our budget this. Shows our stats. For the budget from 2013. Up through the, last enacted, budget in 2018. Here. The green is the, water, power office, and the blue is the hotter the green is their green energy, and the blue is a hydropower, so.

You Can see that we've had a nice upward increasing. Trend in our office so we're pretty excited about that on this, last budget had a total of 105, million dollars, seventieth, at was the marine energy, and. 35, that was for hydropower. Okay. Now that we know a little bit about what the water power office is and what we do I wanted, to dive into the current state of the marine renewable energy industry, here. Are a bunch of different pictures of all the different kinds of marine renewable energy, devices that. Are out on the market today and out in the water and testing, you. Can see that there are many. Different kinds, here is. A turbine, that gets energy from currents. This. Is a tidal, turbine, kind, of looks like a wind turbine so it's a little bit different, and. Then anything that kind of sits on top of the water like these here are what we call wets which are wave energy converters, and, they just sit on the top of water and get the energy from the, waves and then, there's some kind of out there ones there's this. Sheet that oscillates back and forth with the motion of the ocean it gets energy from that and so. When we're looking at all these different kinds, of devices. Something I want to bring you to your attention to is how diverse, they really are there's, not one sort. Of device there's not one. Archetype. Of each device and so. When we start thinking about, where. The industry is and where it's going I really like to talk about the wind industry because, it's kind of a following kind of a similar trajectory and so, if you look at these different kinds of devices. When. The wind injured when energy, industry, was just getting started you can see that there are a lot of different, there's lots of diversity here all, these different ways that people were working on to get energy out of the wind and eventually. Through lots of trial and error they, converged. Upon the three bladed turbine are all pretty familiar with. Looking. At the marine energy industry, you can see that we do not yet have our, three bladed turbine and so, that's, something that makes this entered this industry really exciting, to work in because there's a lot of innovation, and invention. Going, on every day but. It is important, context to note when talking about the water power technologies, office and so. Um I just wanted to bring up a few reasons that that is still true, first. I don't think I have to tell this group this but we know that the ocean is a very hostile, environment salt, water is corrosive wave. Action, can be damaging, to certain devices and so just getting the devices, tested, in the water and making sure that they work can, be pretty challenging expensive. Also. Putting something in the ocean requires a lot of regulatory. Hoops. That you have to jump through you could be that state or federal so, getting, water getting, device into the water can be a challenge. And so that all those factors. Kind of coalesce to make it so. We. Have not yet converged, upon a particular technology. Okay. So now we have an idea of what the devices are like I wanted to talk a little bit about the, resource that we have available across. The globe I really. Like this figure because it shows all the different wave. Energy resources, across the world as the. Colors get warmer that means it's a more intense resource, and. I want to bring your attention to two specific places. One. Is off, the coast of the west coast of the United States has, high wave action, as well. As here. Off the coast of Europe. And that, is important, when, we start thinking about, the. Different players in the global marine energy industry. So, on the side here this is just showing all the different numbers, of renewable, energy companies I will. Note that these are just do the estimates, so. Something. To know but. In first place we have Europe. They have the highest number, of marine, renewable energy devices companies, and, followed closely by the u.s., something. I think is interesting and, really speaks to that wave resource, map that I just showed most, of these companies are. Developing. Wave energy, devices and, that's shown by the part, of the bar that's in blue but. The orange part is current, and so something that's just kind of interesting, you see Canada, is the only country that, is not mostly focusing on wave and that's, because, they have the Bay of Fundy there so they're really working on current devices. But. Something that's pretty exciting about this is that the USA, is home to more than a third of all active marine energy companies, so. We're really there's a lot of activity going on here just domestically, um which. Again is very exciting so, now, zooming in to, a more, local level I wanted to show you guys this pic this figure of the.

Wave And title. Resources, in the US as the colors, get darker that means a more intense wave, energy. Intensity, and so. Again, you. See off the west coast there's, a lots of wave action there which, is why we, chose the west coast to be the site of the new testing, center open in a few years called pack wave then I mention before this. Map also shows that the opportunities. For, tidal across. The US so you can see that there's quite a great. Resource here domestically. In the United States over. Here if we look at the pie charts, this shows all the different kinds, of marine renewable energy we have and. The. Darker colors are what we call theoretically, extractable. Energy this, is energy that is out in the ocean that exists. And then. On the smaller part of the pie chart is what's called technically, extractable, and this, is the energy that we can actually take out of the ocean and so the reason those are so different is because the. Technically. Extractable, is due to losses and efficiency, that you get when you convert energy as well, as what's. Viable. And realistic to actually extract and so even though it seems like that's only a small slice, slice, of the pie here for each of these resources. It. Is actually, a, 1500. Terawatt-hours per, year is technically. Extractable. From all the energy resources that we have on this map and that is equivalent to about 30 percent of all u.s. generation, so, of all the energy that we generate in the u.s. nearly, 1/3 of it could be matched by these resources, that we have in the u.s. so, it's really quite an opportunity. And. I also really like the stat about the Pacific States if, we could develop just one-sixth of the wave energy off the off the west coast we could power more than 550, homes so. Again this is a lot of, opportunity. Here huge, resource just domestically, in the United States. Ok. Now I want to move on to. A little bit more information about what the water power office is doing in this, space. Traditionally. We focused, mostly on developing. Devices that are grid scale so being apt to be plugged into the continental, grid. However. We've. Lately been focusing, really we've been expanding our focus to include work in the blue economy and so, I think probably most of the folks here pretty familiar with the concept of the blue economy but I wanted to go over what it was just, to be complete, delia, does not have an official definition of the blue economy but we've been using the World Bank's as something that we agree with so. The World Bank says that the blue economy is, the sustainable, use of ocean resources for economic, growth improve, livelihoods and jobs and ocean ecosystem, health and. So note that that really has that triple bottom line approach and not something to you he has has, agreed with this. Figure here is something that a colleague of mine put together and, I think it's a really cool figure because it shows, both. The scope of what we're calling the blue economy pretty, much anything that happens in the ocean, and. It also includes a NOAA study so if we look at. This. One here, the OECD, estimated, in 2010, that, the blue economy is worth about 1.5, trillion and estimates. The value. Of the blue economy you'd be about three trillion in 2030. And. Then Noah did a study that showed just, one small slice of this pie, ocean. Measuring observation, and forecasting. Collectively, generated, about seven, billion dollars per year and supported. About 400, US businesses, and so, when we start thinking about the blue economy we know that there's a lot of opportunity, there it's really big and it's only gonna grow. So. Now I want to move on to how marine renewable energy, in the blue economy are related, we've. Been looking at different, applications, for marine renewable energy, in the blue economy basically. Think even at thinking, of it as an enabling, function because if you have power offshore, you. Have a lot of opportunities, so here, I have some icons, that shows some of the different things we could use renewable, energy for offshore, things.

Like Ocean sensors and observations. Iowa. Algal, biofuel, growth, desalination. Disaster. Relief and so. I wanted to highlight one that I thought would be particularly interesting, for NOAA audience, we've. Been looking at the possibility of using marine renewable energy, to power offshore, aquaculture. And, so here's just a little schematic of what that could look like you could have your device here and it could be powering all the different sorts, of activities, that occur in offshore aquaculture. And. This is really a great opportunity not. Only to replace, things like so fuel but, also to increase food. Security in places that may really need that so, I'm quite an extending opportunity there. So. This, is still, powering. The blue economy in the work surrounding, that is still pretty new and water power and so I wanted to share with you on the visions and goals that we have going forward so. The vision for. This work is unlocking, new opportunities, in ocean science security, and maritime technology through, distributed, applications, of marine renewable energy, those, distributed applications, or things like aquaculture, a UV recharge pig I showed on my previous slide and, we have four overarching, goals going to be going into this work the, first is to support competitive R&D, opportunities, for discrete distributed, and marine renewable technologies. Targeting, maritime markets the. Second is to engage partners, in ocean science security, and maritime technology, to achieve shared, goals the. Third is to unlock new growth in the blue economy through energy system innovation, and last. We know that, working. In these smaller markets, will eventually, increase the technology, readiness towards, grid scale applications. So, it's really a multi, beneficial. Sort, of approach one. Thing that I want to know about this is that in scoping. This program, do he knows that it's bigger than the water power technology office, you're gonna do even and, it's really going to require a lot of cross sector and cross agency, coordination. And, that's something you know those of you in the audience that know me you know I'm very excited about that I think, that that is I'm gonna be a really important part of this going forward. Ok, so now, you know what we're doing with the blue economy you wanted to share some of our recent activities, and, kind of where we are and then I'll end with where we're going, in. 2017. We. Were mostly in a discovery, phase we. Hosted a forum called the distributed, an alternate applications, forum in December, this, brought together different, experts, from different sectors and across the industry to help us determine what these opportunities, were for powering the blue economy and then. In April we published a draft report and through. May through August we, released a request for information where, we asked people to comment on this report and there's, some people in this room that's counted, so thank you we, did take all those comments and we are currently integrating. Them into the report we're finding it making it better, and we're looking at early 2019, to release the report.

Here's. A diagram that shows all. The different comments, we got back we had a really wonderful response, so this RFI we got over 400 comments, from 41, different people and. Like. I said we're now integrating, all those comments this. Top one here this is these are just general comments that we got back but. The second most exciting, chapter for people to comment on was ocean. Observation, and navigation, followed, pretty closely by under underwater. Vehicle, charging and autonomous underwater vehicles, and so, we saw a lot of excitement. And comments, and opinions, on, these two chapters on as well as a lot of the others and so. We're. Really pleased with that response, and it was very useful. So. Looking forward to what comes next we've, started grouping these applications. In kind of two main buckets the, first is power at sea those are things that are powered offshore, so, that includes things like powering, ocean sensors and observations. Sea. Water mineral mining, hydrogen. Production aquaculture. And. The other main bucket is resilient, coastal communities, these would be more near shore applications, that would help increase increase. The resiliency, of coastal, communities, that's. Things like desalination. Disaster. Relief, in recovery and remote communities you, could even set up a micro grid for a community, that doesn't have. The ability to plug into the continental grid so lots of opportunity, there we're. Starting, to work on four main scoping, activities, the first of course is program, planning and looking at all the underlying technical, challenges, within each theme basically. Just asking the question what, do we want to achieve and how can we get there the. Second is early stage Rd, we're, looking both at market, ready opportunities, for some near-term applications. As well as how we can set ourselves up for success in the future the. Third which I've already mentioned is engaging, these, different stakeholders that will be involved in this work, asking. The question how can how, can we ring renewable, energy benefit you, and. Finally we're looking at new innovation, models to expand. This work and so this is really exciting because we've been looking at prizes. And competitions as, a way to, increase innovation, around this space and we're. Actually currently scoping, a prize around, a d-cell wave power design and device so, be releasing. More information officially. Announcing that later this month but. Kind of a sneak peek into some of the work that we're doing. Alright, looks like I have just a few more moments so I just wanted to share some of the other work that we do in the office just to, make you aware of one of the resources that we have available it's, called teeth this or, Tethys depending, on who you ask. This. Is a, database, that has all. Has. A bunch of data and data sets that have to do with and. You have, to do with environmental, interactions. Of marine renewable energy, and on. Taffies is on the report that I mentioned at the beginning called. The 2016. State of the science report, I'll. Be honest with you this is not a short report but I have read it and it is worth reading um it, goes through all the potential, environmental interactions. That marine, renewable energy, devices may have when they're actually installed in the ocean and so that goes from everything from collision. Risk what happens if a whale comes near device to, sound in acoustics, how loud could they be how loud should they be and so, it. Goes through all these different kinds of environmental, effects, and risks that may exist when putting devices, in the water so. It's a really wonderful report, and it will be updated in 2020. I. Wanted. To end with a quick plug there is a happy, hour tomorrow the district ocean networking, happy hour on this downtown at the Eaton hotel on K Street it, brings folks, from across the ocean community, together to, talk. About oceans. And enjoy some drinks and cool space so I wanted to give that a quick plug and then. Open, up for any questions. Um. The. Question was when we're talking about the, blue economy do we include non use value. Are. You talking about the inherent value of the, ocean. Tourism. Right. That's a wonderful question um, yeah. One of the main things that we've been really trying to keep, in the conversation, is that triple, bottom line approach and. Sustainability.

And Value of the oceans is definitely part of that conversation um. Depending. On who's. Quantifying. How important, or how much money. The, blue economy is worth that answer will change so. To be honest I'm not sure but, the OECD, report, how they value better if they did at all but. I know just from conversations, in our office that's something that we do find valuable, and we are thinking, of it like that. That's. A great question so the question was if. We're. Working with Europe, basically, to develop technologies, inside a good summary okay um yeah. Sure and short answer yes um there's a lot of collaboration across, the ocean with Europe. There. Are us-based, companies, and European based companies, but there are a lot of. There. Are a lot of ways that we all work, together and, the. One that comes to mind that seems most relevant is conferences. Most, of these conferences do have a very international audience, and so we come together to do information, sharing and find out what everyone's up to um in. Terms of Technology, Development I can't, speak to what the crossover, is my my, guess would be yes because um they are also, working on such a similar kind. Of device that, that. Yeah there's quite a lot of communication, between the two. Anything. Online. Okay. Thank you so much. How. Many companies are commercially, using the ocean, oh. That's. A great question okay yeah commercial. Commercial. Movable energy on there is one commercial, installation, it's a tidal turbine, array, and it's in Scotland. But. That is the only we don't have any domestic, commercial applications. Of energy. Thank. You. Next. Up we're going to have.

2018-10-14 17:25

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