The new award challenges participants to seek innovative solutions to ensure energy endurance during marine extremes
The ocean contains enough water to fill trillion-gallon containers. It’s no surprise, then, that these vast bodies of water hold secrets, many of which remain beyond the reach of humanity. But some mysteries — like the formation of superstorms and tsunamis or the rapid decline of seafood — are too important to ignore. Disaster warnings can save lives; Seafood nourishes them.
But it’s not just the size of the ocean that hinders exploration. Ocean exploration requires technology, technology requires energy, and the ocean is an energy desert. But that doesn’t have to be the case.
Bring the Powering the Blue Economy™: Power at Sea Prize to our attention. Last week, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO) launched this new $1.7 million challenge. The award is part of the American-Made Challenges program and is administered by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
The Power at Sea Prize pits teams against each other to advance offshore technologies that can harness some of the ocean’s immense energy (also known as ocean energy, or energy derived from waves, currents, tides, or even changes in the ocean). salinity, pressure or temperature). ). In two award phases, teams will explore how to develop technologies that can support offshore activities – such as marine research or seafood farming – while protecting the ocean’s vast resources (a concept known as “Powering the Blue Economy”).
There is enough wave energy in U.S. waters to meet nearly 60% of the country’s electricity needs. Although the United States cannot harness all of the energy, even a small portion could help power emerging ocean exploration technologies. For example, these devices could help monitor fish and wildlife populations and the health of ecosystems, more accurately predict when and where tropical storms might strike, or clarify the ocean’s role in addressing climate change. But before the ocean can power the entire body of knowledge, researchers, entrepreneurs and other innovators must turn their early concepts into technologies.
The sooner the better: Global communities are increasingly relying on the sea for everything from food to data to transportation. Of course, all this activity takes energy. With the Powering the Blue Economy initiative, WPTO aims to boost this so-called blue economy while protecting and preserving the ocean’s valuable resources. The new Power at Sea Prize is consistent with this mission.
In the two phases of the award, participants will work to develop novel concepts for ocean energy technologies (concepts may still be in early stages of development). In the first phase, CONCEPT, each team begins refining their design and must select a blue economy challenge to tackle. For example, teams could focus their technologies on:
- Improve access to offshore work by reducing the costs of operating these activities or expanding the ability to service and maintain offshore technologies
- Improve mission endurance, or how long a device can stay at sea
- Improve energy storage to enable offshore technologies to do more, e.g. B. collect more data or survey more areas of the ocean before their batteries run out or they return to land
- Minimize negative environmental or ecological impacts on local flora and fauna
- Overcome harsh operating conditions by addressing challenges such as unwanted growth of marine organisms
- Use ocean energy to combine with other renewable energy sources and fill power gaps created by variable energy resources such as solar and wind energy
- Generate appropriate power to meet the needs of various offshore technologies such as sensors, instruments and automation and maximize the efficiency of a device.
At the end of the first phase, prize administrators will select up to 20 winning teams to receive a cash prize from a pool of up to $200,000. In the second phase, DEVELOP, participants refine their designs and receive support to further develop the technology after the award closes. Up to 20 DEVELOP phase winners will receive cash prizes from a pool of up to $1,500,000. Teams also receive technical support through office hours, webinars, networking sessions and training on ocean energy, blue economy applications, commercialization best practices or other topics of interest.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries Office of Aquaculture, the NOAA-led U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System, the NOAA Ocean Acidification Program, and NOAA’s National Sea Grant College Program also provide technical support for this award.
The Power at Sea CONCEPT phase is now open for submissions and closes on July 26, 2024. Learn more about the challenge in the first webinar taking place on November 29, 2023.
Visit American-Made Challenges to find more U.S. Department of Energy competitions designed to advance clean energy innovation. Learn more about NREL’s ocean energy research and development and subscribe to the lab’s hydroelectric newsletter.
Comments are closed.