Since electricity was first produced in
America, hydropower has really been
America's original renewable. And it
remains a backbone of our energy
infrastructure today, whereas marine and
hydrokinetics, mhk, basically wave and
current energy technologies, those are
those the new kids on the block. But
really they're a lot there's a lot more
diversity to these two technologies then
this slide let's on. This is really the
range of opportunities that water presents
for both hydropower on the top and and
marine energy on the bottom and if i can
just highlight a few of them starting
with non-powered dams and this is something
that most folks might not know a lot
about. So for references about 2,000
hydropower plants in the country there
are 80,000 dams that don't produce any
energy. These are built for irrigation
flood control navigation like stand here
and a study that we released back in 2012
shows that just powering the top 100 of
these can add another six gigawatts of
generating capacity the country's that's
more than enough for 1.5 million homes
and since then we've instituted a number
of different research projects to help
develop technologies that can
specifically take advantage of these
resources. Wave energy is the most
predominant marine energy source that
the US has at least and for context just
just capturing about 5% of the
technically available resource would power
about a third of the west coast. And we
started a number of different programs
to help develop these technologies, one
that I will talk about in a couple of
minutes the wave energy prize, which was
aimed at doubling the state of the art
of energy capture for these types of
devices. And last but certainly not least
pump storage, most people probably don't
realize that the US has actually
developed and then operating large
commercial energy storage projects for
decades. Pump storage where you pumped
water with excess electricity up to an
upper reservoir and then run it back
downhill through conventional turbines
when you need the electricity, this
represents more than 97%
of our commercially available energy
storage in the US. right now and we're
working on a bunch of different research
projects to help reduce the cost of new
advanced functions technologies and make
them more flexible as well. One project
from a funding opportunity recently
announced was actually award to shell an
award to shell north america,
for them to investigate the development
of new small lower-cost closed-loop pump
storage systems that use innovative
structures for reservoirs - like abandoned
quarries or mines, and aren't connected
to a river system like this plant down
in Georgia is. And so that allows them to
be deployed much more widely all across
the country but also helps reduce any
potential environmental impacts that
you're not tied into a river system like
this so trying to sum all of this up
simply from this graph combines all of
those different resource opportunities
into one visual. What you find is that
there really opportunities almost
everywhere across the country. There's
significant wave energy resources all
across the west coast in Hawaii and
Alaska, more geographically isolated
tidal energy resources in the northwest
in Alaska and northeast and ocean
current energy in the southeastern US
because of the presence of the Gulf
Stream, so and hydropower really is
spread pretty well across the interior
of the country. There are huge
opportunities for developing those
non-power dams I talked about in the
Midwest, for upgrading existing
hydropower facilities in the southeast
and in the northwest, and lots of
opportunities for developing pump
storage and new small low-impact
hydropower project. So all total, this
equates to more than a hundred gigawatts
of potential roughly doubling the amount
of hydro power or water power I should
say that we have in the US right now.
So to downshift and and talk just
a little bit about hydropower for a
couple minutes,
the one thing that I really want to
re-emphasize just how important the
existing
hydro fleet in the US is to US energy
infrastructure. It represents about six to
seven percent of our of our generation
every year is still the largest
renewable energy resource we have
by generation, although asterisk there i
think when power is just overtaken us in
terms of capacity, so good on them. But
even more importantly than that it is
probably one of the most flexible
resources that we have available to us -
hydro and pumped- storage are often compared
to natural gas in terms of the amount of
services that they provide to the grid in
the help that they provide in terms of
integrating other variable renewables
like wind and solar or making base load
generation like coal and nuclear more
efficient themselves. And to highlight that
point, who here remembers the big
blackout in the Northeast in 2003? Who
survived it? Who lived through it? Who still has
the t-shirt?
Yeah, those are collectors editions.
My point here is actually that in this
huge event in the US it was hydropower and
pump storage plants in western New York
on that help to stabilize the grid and
keep the bracket blackout spreading, but
also that started that was the first
units available to help restart the grid...
when they were needed. To highlight just
a few that types of projects that we
support over the years, this is a small
hydropower plant in Kentucky, it's been
grinding grain since the Civil War, still
produces flour today.. their muffin
mixes fantastic .. product
placement, but they also produce about
twice as much energy as they did just 10
years ago because of a DOE research
grant to deploy and demonstrate a new
innovative generator technology. And
hydropower plants they come in all
shapes and sizes across the u.s. - from
hundreds of small distributed plants
like this to a fair number of big
facilities like this. This is Grand
Coulee, is the largest hydropower plant
in the US, for context it produces
about the same amount of power at 6 to 8
traditional nuclear coal plants. So
almost 7 gigawatts more than enough for a
million-and-a-half homes. And it also
owned and operated by the federal
government interestingly, as is about
half the hydropower the US. And for that
reason our office has developed very
close working relationships and
partnerships with other federal agencies
like the Corps of Engineers and your
reclamation we actually I'll just
re-signed a big five-year agreement to
continue to collaborate on research
around hydropower. And one of our
projects that just wrapped up last year,
that included DOE National
Laboratories, was an effort to improve
the underlying physics of operational
water quality models used in facilities
like this to help improve their
efficiency and reduce their
environmental impact. This is another
project developed by a relatively new
company Natel Energy and at an
existing irrigation canal, you can see
this canal before the project is built,
and Natel got a research grant from
DOE to develop, test, and and demonstrate
their new small hydropower technology.
The project today is commercially
operational generating power onto the
grid and all the power is actually being
sold to apple... go figure.
This company is really amazing too. I
mean, they've grown from just a couple of
individuals a few years ago to several
dozen today and they just opened their
first major manufacturing plant out in
California last year. The last thing I'll say on
hydropower, if you want to know more,
we just released a major study several
years in the making the hydropower
vision last year, which looks at a whole
range of features scenarios in terms of
development possibilities for hydro in
the US. And it was just DOE that did
it.
More than 300 individuals from a hundred
different organizations - including other
federal government agencies, hydropower
owners and operators, environmental NGOs,
universities national lab staff were all
involved. There there's a huge amount of
of work and time and effort that went
into that.
To pivot to marine energy very quickly, I
like to start with this quote because i
think it illustrates both the difficulty
but the lure of developing brain energy
i mean it's just really hard to deploy
anything in the high energy environments.
I mean an oceanographer that i was
talking to you once was like why would
you ever bother going there that's where
I lose all of my equipment. But the
prize is huge too.
I mean because water is about a hundred
times as dense as air, a small fast
moving current or medium-sized wave
actually packed a lot of energy. That's
one of the reasons why wind turbines are so
comparatively big and tidal turbines are
so comparatively small..energy density.
But there are a lot of other potential
benefits very energy to its highly
predictable and forecastable. So that's
one of the reasons why surfers know what
the waves are going to be like a few
days in advance and tidal currents can be
predicted basically down to the minute,
and that's highly valuable for grid
operators and planners. So, this was the
state of the marine energy industry 10 to
15 years ago. It's probably what most
people assume this is the industry is
today. A lot of you know wild ideas drawn on
the back of napkins, developed in garages,
you know crazy ideas all over the map.
This is actually the state of the
industry today,maybe still a few crazy
ideas floating around there, but they're
there are dozens of companies that have
been started that are testing and
demonstrating deploying technologies all
around the world including the US. And
this is just a sampling of technologies
that are under development that has been
tested currently in the u.s.,Almost all
of these have received some kind of
research support from Department of
Energy as well. And there's there's no
there's no um lying it's a difficult
journey it's gonna be awhile before
these technologies are cost-competitive
with commercial energy technologies
today. But there's no there hasn't really
been yet all of the technology converges
that we eventually saw in
the wind industry and doing that and pushing
that forward is going to take a lot of
work, a lot of testing and demonstration.
A few successes , probably a few
failures, but that's not to say the
industry hasn't moved forward in leaps
and bounds in recent years.
These are three examples of commercial
tidal energy projects that have been
deployed three different countries in
Europe.Each of these turbines produces
about 1 to 2 megawatts enough for a
couple thousand homes, and you'll notice
they all look very different to theirs
still haven't been a lot of convergence
in that sector as well. But the other
point I want to make here is that this
is a globally developing market, it's
developing quickly, and that presents an
opportunity for us technologies and
developers as well in terms of exports
manufacturer but we have to stay ahead
of the curve other people are working on
this you know very quickly as well and
there's also the potential for the u.s.
to get left behind if if we don't push
forward on our own. So to do that is
to stay on the cutting edge of the in
this case for wave energy technology, our
office supported this project the wave
energy prize for the last couple of
years and as I mentioned before the goal
is to double the state of the art of
energy capture for wave energy devices
and we first announced this competition
more than 90 teams applied initially and
eventually through several rounds nine
of them move forward to the Navy's
gigantic wave basin just up the road
Maryland carderock facility for each of
them has been a week
testing their devices in this is wave
tank and i have to say the results are
actually spending this is a challenge
that we didn't think her we weren't sure
that anyone would actually been able to
meet you know you're trying to set a
pretty high bar here in the end four of
the nine teams were able to successfully
at least double energy capture and the
winning team here pictures from Oregon
was able to increase energy captured by
five times and which is impressive
probably even more impressive though
they basically developed a device for
their solution to this problem
out of the garage said American
ingenuity is at its best
this is them with their 1.5 million
dollar grand-prize winners check the
last thing that I will say is stressed
about the need for testing facilities as
i mentioned before it's extremely hard
to put anything in the marine
environment and having pre permitted
sites and infrastructure available like
power cables and anchors that just helps
increase the pace of the design cycle
and so that's one reason why we partner
closely with the US Navy to develop and
deploy wave energy devices at a facility
that they've built out of the Marine
Corps Base that they have out on the
island of Oahu in Hawaii
this is a device that's testing out
there right now as we speak
hopefully fingers crossed but their
their site here as the the capability of
testing three different individual
single devices on the Navy's interested
in mhk for a couple of different reasons
one to help power it its basis which are
distributed you know all over the world
but also because of the potential for
providing remote or distributed power
for sensors or instrumentation you know
national security infrastructure that
that none of us have the secur security
clearance to talk about at an inn
compliment to this facility do is also
supporting the development of a much
larger wave energy test facility off the
coast of oregon that is capable of
testing a raids of different multiple
arrays that different devices in higher
energy environment so after a
competitive process last year we just
announced recently that a consortium led
by the University of or by Oregon State
University we're going to be receiving
about 40 million dollars of federal
funding supported by more than 20
million dollars is non federal money to
build out this project and when it's
finished in about three or four years
it's going to position the u.s. to be
one of the world leaders in terms of
wave energy development test
so with that I wanted to say in
conclusion if i leave you with with one
idea today it's that there are really a
a wide array a diverse set of
opportunity to developing water power
technologies in the u.s. hydropower
remains one of the most critical
components are in our energy
infrastructure there are opportunities
for it to grow is still growing actually
today contrary maybe some popular
opinions and pump storage represents one
of the best near-term opportunities we
have to develop more energy storage and
flexibility and security for the grid
and while you may not be seeing any mhk
projects developed off of each year you
in the next couple of years they
probably are much further along than
most people think or realize and I don't
think that the opportunity and the
potential in the can be ignored
so with that thank you very much i hope
this is interesting and please if you
want to know more go to our new our new
website thanks