Ocean Power Joins The Renewable Energy Mix
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Renewable energy, led by solar and wind combined with battery storage, along with hydro and geothermal projects, is the fastest-growing source of new electricity generation in the U.S., helping to wean the grid from greenhouse gas-spewing fossil fuels. The clean power arsenal could soon grow with another form of natural energy: ocean waves.
Last week, Stockholm-based startup Eco Wave began operating the first wave-based electric power project in the U.S. at the Port of Los Angeles. It’s a series of seven steel “floaters” attached to a wharf that act like a bellows as the waves push them up and down, which pumps a hydraulic cylinder that spins a turbine to make electricity. For now, it’s just a demonstration project, but founder and CEO Inna Braverman wants to eventually construct a 60-megawatt commercial-scale version along an 8-mile breakwater in the harbor that could supply enough electricity to power 60,000 homes.
A benefit to wave-generated power is that it’s constant, unlike wind or sunshine. “Wave energy is the most stable and the least intermittent source of renewable energy. In suitable locations, it can actually produce 24/7,” Braverman said at the opening of the pilot system last week. “It can be a stabilizing factor for solar and for wind because solar is great, but you have the night, you have cloud coverage and you don’t produce anything. The wind blows for a few hours, but when the wind finishes blowing, the turbine doesn’t work anymore.”
Though Tidal energy has been studied for many years, Eco Wave and other companies are only beginning to test how well it delivers in real-world conditions. Certainly, U.S. researchers think it could be quite impactful. “The theoretical annual energy potential of waves off the coasts of the United States was estimated to be as much as 2.64 trillion kilowatthours, which is equal to about 63% of total U.S. utility-scale electricity generation in 2023,” according to the Energy Information Administration.
It may take years for Eco Wave or other ocean power companies to scale up, but the Los Angeles pilot joins projects already underway in Taiwan and Portugal, with India also looking at the technology. New Jersey is likely to be the next U.S. site for an Eco Wave project, according to Braverman. Because it’s new, there aren’t yet clear regulations for ocean-based power systems and there’s likely to be a need for extensive environmental assessments to ensure large future systems don’t harm aquatic life.
Braverman said that Eco Wave’s biggest challenge isn’t technological but legal. “There is a lack of a regulatory framework in the United States and everywhere else in the world because wave energy is so new,” she said.
The Big Read
California High-Speed Rail Authority
California Bullet Train Getting Up To $20 Billion In State Funding Amid Trump Fight
California’s legislature is moving ahead with plans to provide as much as $20 billion in additional funding for the state’s financially challenged high-speed rail system, which will help complete the initial Central Valley portion and start work connecting it to San Francisco and Los Angeles. The move comes as the state also sues the Trump administration for attempting to claw back $4 billion of federal funds.
State legislators are reauthorizing California’s Cap-and-Trade program, which requires the biggest industrial emitters of greenhouse gases to buy pollution credits, through 2045, with plans to direct $1 billion a year from that source to the rail project for the next two decades, a plan pushed by Governor Gavin Newsom. It’s the biggest funding commitment in the project’s history, which got underway after voters approved a $10 billion bond measure in 2008. Though the estimated cost to build the system has tripled since then to more than $100 billion and construction timetables have lengthened dramatically, work on the first 171-mile phase is extensive and has accelerated in the last few years.
“Today’s agreement has made a big, bold statement about California’s future—one that will create jobs, cut pollution and connect and transform communities across the state,” CEO Ian Choudri said in a statement. “This funding agreement resolves all identified funding gaps for the Early Operating Segment in the Central Valley and opens the door for meaningful public-private engagement with the program.”
Choudri, a veteran of global infrastructure projects who took over as the bullet train’s leader last year, released a new business plan last month that’s intended to accelerate construction and find new revenue sources from the authority’s vast landholdings to help hold down the total cost, including letting tech firms build data centers on its property, powering them with solar farms that will also propel its trains. Other ideas include selling rights to telecom companies to lay fiber optic cable along the train’s path and install cellular towers, advertising and station naming rights, electric vehicle charging services and promoting real-estate development projects on its route, especially in lower-priced Central Valley cities such as Fresno and Bakersfield.
Read more here
Hot Topic
Josh Raglin, Norfolk Southern’s Chief Sustainability Officer, on improving freight rail fuel efficiency and emissions
What are the biggest improvements you can point to in terms of making freight operations more sustainable?
From an environmental perspective, we’ve been making huge strides in fuel efficiency. We’ve improved 12% just in the last five years. We’ve got a really great team on board and we’re continuing to push the lever this year. We’ve had four quarters now of record fuel efficiency on locomotives, so that’s very important for us. That’s 90% of our Scope One and Two emissions, and that’s also our second-largest expense.
Do those gains come primarily from newer-generation locomotive engines?
For the last 10 years, we’ve been modernizing [our fleet] at around 100 units a year. We’ll actually hit our thousandth unit, I believe, next week. And we’re converting units from DC traction to AC traction as part of those modernizations as well, which gives you a lot more pulling power, a lot more efficiency on the railroad. A lot of investments in technology and energy management systems. Think of it as cruise control for trains.
Can you elaborate on the benefits of AC traction for freight trains?
The tractive effort greatly improves. Two AC locomotives have the pulling power of three DCs, so it’s a huge difference. For example, we’ve got 700 fewer locomotives in our fleet since 2019, and part of that is because of the conversions that we’ve been investing in over the last 10 years.
Electrification seems trickier for heavy freight locomotives compared with cars and trucks, given how much power you need to get moving. Are battery-powered trains realistic or is a hybrid powertrain a better option?
On the battery side, we actually developed one in-house back in 2008 called the NS 999 and it had 1,080 12-volt car batteries on it. We replaced the batteries a couple of years later with better technology and utilized that unit for about 10 years in a yard application, and eventually sold it to a company in California. The last time I checked, it was still in operation out there, of course, with better battery technology.
We’ve looked at some of the battery electric locomotives that the OEMs are starting to come out with. When we started looking at where we put these units, we started talking to the local utility and it’s a really quick conversation when you get into the energy demand of charging. For example, for one locomotive to be charged requires the equivalent to 83 EV fast chargers.
When you say, “Hey, I may have four, maybe six locomotives at the site,” the utility says, “There’s no way we’re going to be able to get you that much power.” [Battery-electric locomotives] are going to have a limited use case.
Hybrids offer a huge opportunity. We’ve got a project we announced last year with Alstom in New York state. They’re going to retrofit two of our units to create hybrid units. They’ll run off batteries all the time, but have a small Tier-IV diesel engine on board to run and charge the batteries as needed, similar to some of the hybrid trains we have. But they will also be able to be plugged in. That’s a rail yard application.
I think there are huge opportunities to incorporate more batteries on existing locomotives.
Along with improving fuel efficiency and more electrification, what other areas are helping improve sustainability?
One of the really significant highlights this year, and I had to double-check the numbers when I got them, was like scrap metal recycling. Our waste diversion rate last year was 88%, which is absolutely huge. But the rail industry has a great story there. Many of our assets are long-lived and they’re able to be repurposed at the end of life, with scrap metal being one of those.
Some of it’s old rail, some of it’s old box cars, for example. A lot of it’s just cleaning up metal across our system. We had a concerted effort across our operations teams to really put more emphasis on our yards and in our right of way and saying, “Hey, let’s get a lot of the scrap metal cleaned up.” We moved forward with some retirements of the boxcar fleet as well. We recycled over 250,000 tons of scrap metal last year. That was a five-X increase over the prior year and we’re probably on track to hit that again this year. It’s a really good number and it’s got financial gain. We sell that material and it contributes to the bottom line as well.
What Else We’re Reading
The EPA wants to end a requirement that large polluters report their greenhouse gas emissions (Associated Press)
Norway’s $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund is looking to expand investments in renewables (Bloomberg)
Rising heat waves are tied to fossil fuel and cement production, study finds (Nature)
California’s first solar-covered canal is now fully online (Canary Media)
The Energy Department dissolves the research group behind its controversial climate report (CNN)
Scientists fight climate doom with a lab-grown coral breakthrough (SF Gate)
Patagonia changed the apparel business. Can it change food, too? (New York Times)
Illinois farmers find that sheep and solar arrays go well together (Canary Media)
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