The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the scientific think tank and research facility that works on behalf of America's power companies, is watching latest developments in ocean-based energy.

In recent forecasts, EPRI published that current and wave power could someday meet as much as 10% of total U.S. demand in the future.

It's been slow to start, but there's now a gold rush of sorts underway.

In the U.S., private investors have recently filed more than 40 new marine power applications with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, representing a few thousand megawatts of clean ocean power. Most of these applications were spurred by EPRI's research work and its identification of promising sites.

Why, if it's so environmentally benign, hasn't ocean energy yet become a more widely adopted way of producing electricity?

Cleantech.com sought out Roger Bedard, head of EPRI's ocean power research.

Roger Bedard: quick with a joke, and always smiling.
His French Canadian roots?

We caught up with him at EPRI's hillside HQ in Palo Alto, California.

What's the cost of ocean power today?

Any time you're introducing a new technology, there's a learning curve. You need a lot of cumulative experience, and manufacturing scale, before you can drive down the cost of electricity. We haven't really begun down that learning curve yet in ocean power.

The first commercial deal, the first real datapoint, is in Portugal. They declared they didn't want to be addicted to oil, and they're doing something about it. They're paying about 40 USD cents equivalent a kilowatt hour from their first 3 MW wave power plant [based on OPD's Pelamis] in Portugal.

Now, as a parallel, when wind started 20 years ago, it was very high. It's now been driven down to about 7 cents a kw/hr.

The same economies of scale can apply to ocean power over time.

Most companies in ocean energy at this time are vendors and non-utility entities (PG&E recently announced plans to get into wave power - see PG&E initiating wave power research.) Does that make it harder for utilities to accept it?

There are actually about 4 or 5 utilities now active in North America. There's one in wave. And in tidal, Tacoma Power and Snohomish Public Utility District have both applied, and there's Nova Scotia Power in Canada.

It's not hard to get utilities to work with private investors because of the renewable portfolio standards they're working to meet. They're very interested in power purchase agreements with private investors. I think the utilities are getting easier to work with.

What about the survivability of these systems?

Ocean Power Delivery's Pelamis design is well designed for survivability. It rides through the big waves, it doesn't ride over them. It's got three years experience in the North Sea, and it's still surviving.

It's still fairly early, but I think there are engineering designs that can mitigate the issue.

I jokingly use the phrase that these machines "are like little wind turbines on steroids." There's a lot more force, greater torques, not to mention debris and other external forces that wind turbines are not subject to.

Remember, only a small number of machines have actually been only been in the water a relatively small amount of time. We're at a very, very early stage.

What about the intermittent nature of marine power?

Intermittency isn't the whole issue. It's intermittency plus predictability.

Wind and solar are intermittent, but they're not very predictable because they depend upon the weather, i.e. "there'll be a 50% change of rain tomorrow." But with tidal, it's not like there's a 50% chance the moon is going to rise tomorrow. We can totally predict the intermittency.

Smart grid dispatchers will be able to schedule in the known availability of tide energy.

With waves, we don't have quite as good predictability, but it's very, very good. There are data buoys all over the ocean feeding realtime data. We therefore get a few days notice of waves and when they're going to hit the coast.

EPRI has just started a new study to look at the potential accuracy of forecasting waves. NOAA [the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] uses a program called Wave Watch III that all the mariners use to know what the waves are. We're going to using it to look at pairs of buoys, comparing waves at offshore buoys and ones closer in.