The biggest effort underway for wave energy is PacWave South, now completing construction off Oregon. The project features competing wave energy devices all designed to be functioning this summer and part of grid-tied testing in 2024. Oregon beat out Central California for Department of Energy funding as the wave energy hub, and state leaders have been receptive to any ideas to test the technology, greatly increasing Fort Bragg’s chances to get the grant with Oneka, one state official said. Fort Bragg wants to play a bigger role in the process, especially in regards to tidal energy in the greater Bay Area.
There have also been Blue Economy aquaculture ideas talked about including one plan away from the ocean that has been discussed with state officials. “The City of Fort Bragg is investigating the possibility of adding a desalination component to its Green Economy project which includes a land-based aquaculture project,” said Reed of the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, region 1. “In March, we met with City staff, their consultant, and State Water Board staff to discuss requirements for permitting an ocean desalination plant under the California Ocean Plan and the federal National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) program. The City indicated that it may move forward with the aquaculture project and tackle desalination later. We’ve heard nothing since that date.”
There have been discussions of a red urchin nursery in Fort Bragg so that that edible species can replace the purple urchin, which has devoured the kelp forests and destroyed the abalone fishery. There is a very limited market for purple urchins.
Public Works Director John Smith said the city has now made the Oneka project the priority and will look at the other Blue Economy proposals, including aquaculture, plan later. Property that the Noyo Center for Marine Science owns adjacent to the city’s oceanfront sewer plant, where the fresh water could come onshore from the wave energy raft may become was looked at as part of a future aquaculture plan.
Another massive blue economy project the city could hook up with is the now federally funded plan for towering wind turbines planned offshore of Humboldt County. That project is one of the biggest Blue Economy projects in the state, including studies off Cape Mendocino, with operations getting started all along that Coast and an operations center being built off Avenue of the Giants at the Pepperwood Exit
https://humboldtgov.org/2408/Humboldt-Wind-Energy-Project
The state has a world leading research for desalination, the National Alliance for Water Innovation “Innovation Hub” funded by the U.S. Dept of Energy and run by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley, to dramatically lower the cost and energy required for desalination and water reuse. Fort Bragg City councilmembers said the only problem they had with any of the plans is that the cost of the water would be too high for local residents. The Center is studying ideas ranging from paying for the cleaning of polluted water and salt water with the minerals removed. Another idea is open source code which would allow greater utilization by small cities and poor parts of the world. Projects (nawihub.org).
The most modern wave energy plans are surprisingly like one that started the modern wave energy revival. (Romans used wave and tidal energy.) Scotland has been a leader since the modern beginnings of wave energy research since the 1970s when Professor Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh invented Salter’s Duck, the first modern working wave energy device. The curved bobbing duck showed great potential in test pools but was never deployed to sea. It’s very similar to the rafts that have now become popular.
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