Oregon State University’s marine energy research got a boost this week, with federal funding for three projects.
Nearly $2.5 million of U.S. Department of Energy funding will be directed to OSU.
Mechanical Engineering professor Geoff Hollinger said the awards are meant to boost development of renewable ocean energy.
“If we want to expand out marine energy," he told KLCC, "and we want to make it something that is big and is something that's providing energy – for instance, 60% of the energy for the West Coast, I've heard that number before – then we need to scale up. And we don't have the ships, and we don't have the divers to do that.”
Hollinger said the projects will aim to improve the efficiency of wave energy converters, demonstrate a co-design model for open source tools for wave energy converter performance improvements, and his own initiative, which will look into docking autonomous underwater maintenance vehicles on site, so they can recharge from wave energy.
Holinger said the work is a group effort across universities, government and industry. The complete list of funding selections is available here.
The investment is in addition to a $5.5 million award from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that was announced in June. Hollinger says the two rounds of funding are unrelated, but both will support marine energy development.
