United States makes concrete plans to boost marine energy by 2030

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has released its first multi-year program plan for the development of marine energy, outlining the research priorities and plans through 2025, as well as additional objectives running until 2030.

The multi-year program plan, released by U.S. DOE’s Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO), details research, development, demonstration, and commercial activities across both hydropower and marine energy for the coming years and outlines how these efforts can help meet the U.S. energy and sustainability goals.

The plan features key performance goals for 2025, as well as additional objectives running through 2030.

All outlined goals are said to contribute to the overarching mission of WPTO to enable research, development, and testing of new technologies to advance marine energy and hydropower systems for a flexible, reliable grid.

Marine energy, the newest suite of clean energy technologies, is material to both short-term and long-term U.S. goals for decarbonization, sustainability, and economic growth, it is stated in the program plan.

Through WPTO, the U.S. DOE is committed to conducting research, development, demonstration, and commercial activities that advances the development of reliable, cost-competitive marine energy technologies and reduces barriers to technology deployment.

Its marine energy program focuses on key opportunity areas for potential impact on mitigating climate change and enabling a 100% clean energy future through marine energy development and deployment, powering underserved communities and enhancing coastal resilience, as well as accelerating technology development timescales.

In order to reach cost-competitiveness with other energy resources, marine energy technologies need to see dramatic cost reductions over the next 10-20 years, according to U.S. DOE.

In that regard, the U.S. DOE has outlined four program activities with mid-term performance goals to be reached before 2025, which are said to be critical to achieving longer-term follow-on objectives by 2030.

The performance goals and objectives are related to foundational research and development, technology-specific system design and validation, reducing barriers to testing, and data access, analytics and workforce development.

Marine energy program’s foundational R&D supports research to drive cost reductions for the sector, through improving device performance and cutting costs of existing device designs as well as by developing new capabilities that can allow for entirely new designs and approaches to harnessing the energy in water bodies.

The key results and performance goals for 2021–2025 period, set by the U.S. DOE, cover evaluation of applicability and performance of composite and other novel materials for marine energy converter systems and subsystems, such as wave energy converter hulls and tidal energy converter blades.

Also, the focus will be on the development of power take-off (PTO)-control system co-design methodologies and partnering with technology developers to pilot the use in marine energy converter device design processes.

Aside from that, the program’s objective is also to validate foundational modeling tools with data from ongoing-water testing projects, disseminate high fidelity data sets and models, complete resource measurements and assessments in support of marine energy projects, and advance power electronics technologies that support integration of marine energy devices into power at sea and coastal community microgrid system applications, among others.

As for the follow-on objectives, for 2026-2030 period, the U.S. DOE expects to complete integrated, in-water systems testing for new, high-priority materials, power electronics, and other components, perform first generation in-water tests of device designs documented to have used PTO-control system co-design methodologies and tools.

Technology validation is critical to advancing the commercialization of marine energy technologies. This activity area specifically advances systems beyond foundational R&D and focuses specifically on advancing the prototypes necessary to advance marine energy systems across wave, tidal, current, among other energy captures.

In this section of the program plan, the WPTO expects to complete initial field-testing for modular current energy converter systems that capture hydrokinetic river energy in low-flow environments by 2025.

Also, by that time, the first year-long field tests of wave energy converter device designs in fully energetic wave environments are expected to be completed, likely at the PacWave facility, together with pre-commercial demonstrations of newly developed marine energy-powered ocean observing systems and desalination systems.

The WPTO also intends to boost U.S. capabilities for third-party certification of compliance to International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) technical specifications related to marine energy.

The follow-on objectives through to 2030, include deployments of new, commercially available marine energy-powered ocean observation systems for a variety of uses, as well as wave-powered desalination systems for the first uses in disaster recovery or international development scenarios.

Aside from other goals, during the period U.S. DOE expects to move to design and testing of megawatt-scale current energy converter devices and arrays that incorporates installation, operation, and maintenance lessons.

Testing marine energy technologies is inherently more complex, expensive, and time consuming than for land-based energy generation technologies. The already slow pace of design and in-water testing cycles is further exacerbated by the limited availability of testing infrastructure at various scales, complex and time-consuming permitting processes, and expensive environmental monitoring (again, driven by being in-water), according to U.S. DOE.

Therefore, during 2021–2025 period, the department intends to complete a minimum of 100 technical support actions under the Testing Expertise and Access for Marine Energy Research (TEAMER) initiative, and develop a U.S testing network of at minimum 30 facilities.

During the period, the work will be conducted to identify and address testing infrastructure gaps, including needs for non-grid applications, and to gain accreditation for the PacWave grid-connected, open-ocean, wave test facility.

The U.S. DOE will also seek to demonstrate the improved technical performance of seven environmental monitoring technologies in relevant marine energy environments while collecting different types of data and recording marine organism interactions with marine energy devices.

The follow-on objectives until 2030 envision significantly reduced timelines of design iterations for developers and researchers working in the marine energy industry, validation of cost and performance of devices through industry standards, and adoption of best practices for environmental monitoring technologies.

As a public research agency and the primary funder of the country’s marine energy R&D, the U.S. DOE is uniquely capable of aggregating and disseminating objective and accurate information about marine energy.

The marine energy program is said to ensure that data and analysis produced are easily accessible and useful to multiple audiences, such as technology developers, researchers, regulators, educators and students.

During the 2021-2025 period, the U.S. DOE plans to publish an assessment of marine energy industry and researcher data needs, and complete integration of publicly available, WPTO-funded marine energy databases with interconnected search functionality.

Also, the department will collect, analyze, and publish data from the existing in-water testing projects to identify promising areas for additional research.

It will also seek to launch a new marine energy permitting toolkit to improve regulators’ access to and understanding of information about marine energy resources, devices, and potential environmental effects.

The U.S. DOE said it will improve targeted outreach with the intention of diversifying the pool of students participating in WPTO workforce development programs such as the graduate student research fellowship and Marine Energy Collegiate Competition.

For the period running from 2026 to 2030, the U.S. DOE expects increased usage of WPTO-developed data, along with supported marine energy databases and toolkits by a diverse set of stakeholders.

This could also lead to dramatic improvement in regulators’ access to useful marine energy data, helping to reduce uncertainty, improve their ability to assess risk, and achieve efficiency gains when permitting projects.

During the period, the U.S. DOE expects improvements in the diversity of students and student teams participating in WPTO’s fellowship programs and Marine Energy Collegiate Competition, including minority students as well as students from minority-serving institutions.