Beyond Zero talks to Greg Allen of Western Australia wave power developer Carnegie Corporation

Based in Fremantle, Western Australia, Carnegie Corporation has developed the CETO II wave power device that produces zero emissions energy. Their unique system involves pumping a working fluid from the ocean floor to drive a conventional pelton wheel hydro turbine back on land.  The high pressure fluid operates in the same way that the falling water of a conventional hydro dam would act. The technology was developed by the inventor back in the mid 70s yet it is only since 2006 that most of its commercial development has occurred. There is enough wave resource available in proximity to population centres to supply more than half of Australia's current average annual energy demand. Greg Allen is the Chief Operating Officer and joins the Beyond Zero team to discuss the latest developments and implementation of their zero emissions wave power.

The Carnegie Corporation is currently testing technology in Fremantle (approx quarter scale) moving to a full scale unit off Garden Island to be expanded out to a 5MW facility in 2011.

The CETO Unit was conceived by Alan Burns, the original Chairman, and was developed by Carnegie over a number of years (CETO 111 is the current model). In 1975, while diving, Burns was watching the movement of kelp at the bottom of the ocean and realised that rather than restraining the energy of the ocean we could design something that mimics its motion and extract the energy thus created. 

It uses plumbing technology (works like a bike pump attached to the sea floor) with a flexible tether attached to a 'pump', which is attached to a buoyant actuator. This entraps a mass of seawater which mimics the molecules of water in their motion in a wave, just below the surface of the ocean. On an upwards movement it pulls through the tether and actuates the pump on the upstroke. The pump is a positive displacement pump. This means any movement enables it to pressurize the fluid in the system and it pushes that fluid ashore.

The pump sits at one to two metres (at lowest tide) below the surface of the ocean. (The closer to the surface, without breaking the surface, the more energy is collected from the wave). Connected to the CETO device are pipelines which take the generated energy back to shore. Conventional hydro electric power generation equipment ( a pelten wheel turbine) is then utilised. (Carnegie tries to leverage existing technology in the market as much as possible).

In a conventional hydyo electric dam, the higher the dam, the more energy is generated. This technology (the CETO device) is equivalent to a 1200m dam in its power generation. (At the higher end of this technology there is equivalence to an 1800m dam).

Can it provide baseload power?

The wave resource itself is inherently baseload as it is highly consistent and highly predictable. There is 100% availability of one metre waves (the CETO unit starts operating with one metre waves and 'flatlines' in output at four metres) therefore it is possible to extract energy from the waves with a CETO device 100% of the time.

Locations for this technology

Any south-western exposed site around the southern half of Australia. The first priority of this technology's development is to extract energy from the wave environment that typically comes off the southern ocean. The wave energy up to Eden is significant (one to three metres) but has no 'higher end' waves. It is necessary to adapt the technology for such locations with 'lower end' environments.ie. it is still highly consistent but at a lower level.

The northern hemisphere licensee is the renewable energy division of EDF (Energie du France) who have purchased the rights to exploit the technology in the northern hemisphere. EDF are interested in developing sites in Europe, USA and further afield. Europe has been interested in wind and wave energy and diversifying from coal for many years. It is a great vote of confidence in Carnegie and the CETO units that EDF has chosen to go with this technology after a worldwide scan. Carnegie have looked at sites in Costa Rica, New Zealand, Chile etc.

Scaling potential

Sites need to be 20MW or greater for an installation. Larger costs are in the mooring and pipeline systems which bring the fluid back to shore so economics dictates a reasonable scale of facility.

 Carnegie are targetting 50 MW wave facilities. They have licences for a number of sites around Australia for this size facility. The vision is for 1700MW generation by 2020.

A 50MW facility occupies about 30 hectares of sea bed.

 Asked how many sites around SW'n Australia have the right wave height and right conditions on the sea shore, Allen stated that the real question is how much of the resource is readily accessible? There are approximately 17 GW of accessible wave energy sites across the southern half of Australia, from Geraldton to Eden.

Costs

The installation cost for the first 5MW is approx. $10 million per MW. This first plant will be the most expensive. Due to the mass producable nature of the device, scale is necessary and therefore they need to be rolling out about 150MW per year to achieve the economies of scale envisaged by the technology ie. bulk purchasing of equipment, consitent workload etc. will push the capital costs down to $6-7 million per MW. (This does not translate into $/MWhour) The forecast is for 150MW/year - to be competitive with wind ie. $120 - 140/MWhour - to justify investment.

(CETO units themselves are a small proportion of the cost. Most of the cost is the pipeline and onshore facilities).

Jobs

Many jobs will be created in manufacturing the CETO units and in maintaining the plants ie. operating, maintenance, offshore and onshore support. CETO unit attachments are currently being manufactured in Victoria; pump units in Melbourne, Geelong and France; tethers in the UK and actuators in W.A.

Seasonal variation

The energy generation is slightly winter-biassed (25% variation).

Beyond Zero talks to Greg Allen of Carnegie Corporation

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Transcript

Scott Bilby: On today’s show we’re speaking with Greg Allen, he’s the Chief Operating Officer at Carnegie Wave Energy. It’s a West Australian based company that is about to complete a commercial demonstration wave project using fully submerged wave power converters to produce zero greenhouse gas emissions electricity. 

Hello Greg and thanks for joining us all the way from Western Australia. It’s great to speak to you today. Now I’d just like to ask you the basic question we ask a lot of people, is how did you get involved in renewable energy?

Greg Allen: I’m a mechanical engineer and got in involved from the engineering aspect. I worked in the power industry previously and it was a natural progression and certainly an exciting field to be in and it’s doing it for the right reasons as well. That’s probably the main attraction to it.

Scott Bilby: A small scale commercial wave farm is about to be built out in Western Australia can you tell us a little bit about that and then we’ll go into the type of technology you are using.

Greg Allen: Okay, we’ve been testing the technology at Fremantle, so we’ve had a pilot planned operation at Fremantle in Western Australia which was about quarter scale and we’re now moving to employment of the full scale unit off Garden Island in Western Australia and then that will be expanded out into a 5mW facility during the course of 2011. So design and construction in 2011.

Scott Bilby: Okay, that’s great to hear, and can you tell us little bit about the, because they’re called CETO units, can you tell us about what they are and who developed them and what’s the pathway for that?

Greg Allen: The unit itself was conceived by our original chairman Alan Burns, and then it was developed by Carnegie over a number of years. Most of the activity happened between 2000 and 2008, and it progressed from CETO I through to CETO II and we’re now at CETO III. The unit itself is essentially a pumping technology; imagine a bike pump attached to the sea floor. It’s then got a flexible tether attached to that pump, which is attached to what we call a buoyant actuator, which is just below the sea surface. The buoyant actuator entraps a mass of sea water and that mass of sea water then mimics the molecules of water in their motion in the wave. Which is that the molecules of water in a wave just below the surface move in a large circular motion. The buoyant actuator mimics that motion so it gets pushed down with the energy of the wave it follows that path through the bottom of the stroke, or through the bottom dead centre of that elliptical path and then it moves upwards. On that upwards movement it pulls through the tether and actuates the pump on the upstroke. The pump’s a positive displacement pump, which means that any movement enables it to pressurise the fluid in the system and it pushes that fluid ashore.

Matthew Wright: And how far below the surface does the top of the pump actually sit?

Greg Allen: At lowest tide we’ve set it around about one metre, one to two metres at lowest tide. We need to remain reasonably close to the surface of the wave, the energy in a wave decreases with the square of the depth so, the closer you are to the surface, without breaking the surface, the more energy there is in the wave, or the more energy you can collect from that wave.

Matthew Wright: Connected to the special CETO wave energy device is a long series of piping back to shore. Can you tell us a bit about how you actually take the energy, the pressure that you generate in the device, back to shore? 

Greg Allen: Essentially you are right a pipeline is running ashore, conventional pipeline and then onshore we use conventional hydroelectric power generation equipment which is a pelton wheel turbine, similar to a bucket wheel type arrangement. The high pressure fluid is forced against the bucket wheels which rotate that wheel and then that comes off and drives a conventional generator. Where possible we’ve tried to leverage existing technology in the market, be it pipelines, onshore power generation being hydroelectric turbines which have been around since the 1800’s, and then other equipment in terms of hydroelectric treatment of the fluid we’ve got to smooth the fluid, smooth the flow and pressure profile of the fluid from the pulsations we receive from the motion of the waves through to a very smooth flow to go on to the pelton.

Matthew Wright: And our listeners are generally familiar with hydro which you just mentioned then, and you said how you use a pelton wheel which is what hydro dams use. So in a conventional hydro dam, the higher the water is held up and it falls down to hit the hydro generator the more energy you get out. So can you tell us what’s the equivalent sort of energy in terms of a hydro, how high would that be equivalent of a dam wall, the pressure that you’re actually generating?

Greg Allen: We run at higher pressure and the main reason we run at higher pressure is to reduce the loses in the system. Because we’re moving a lot of water around the circuit and we run around 1200 metres *head*5.46 in the system, which is obviously equivalent to a 1200m high dam.

Scott Bilby: So the only kind of dam you’d get in Iceland, or something.

Greg Allen: Yeah there are a few sights around with high pressure hydro electric facilities. I think that we’ve had to learn a lot about high pressure hydro eclectic power generation and particularly the equipment they use. We’re probably middle of the road in terms of operating pressures for high pressure hydro. There are some facilities as high as about 1800m. Probably some are higher in commercially operating hydro electric facilities.

Scott Bilby: And with ocean technologies a big concern has been around the very difficult operating environment it has, salty-saline environment which for componentry can create a lot of wear and difficult maintenance environment. You’ve mitigated that a lot obviously by using the hydro but can you explain you’re not actually sending the salt water back to shore. Can you explain how you minimise having to deal with the difficult salt water environment?

Greg Allen: The original concept or the technology was to pump sea water and at a concept level it was proven that you could pump sea water at pressure ashore push it through a pelton wheel turbine, or even a desalination membrane to produce fresh water. The challenges with that is the predictability of the performance, or the operation and maintenance of the system. So to enable us to have more confidence and to remove some of the variables in the system to move through to commercialisation as soon as possible, we took the step of closing the loop of the system. So we run fresh water in the circuit, it’s got some additives in it that are approved and designed to be discharged. The closing the loop has enabled us to leverage knowledge in the market on lifecycle or maintenance intervals on the equipment we are using, in particular the pumps. The pumps have got sliding seals in them, and they’re really the highest wear item in the system. By controlling the variables in the system we can then have reasonable confidence on predicting the maintenance intervals and we can leverage existing knowledge in the market with existing manufacturers on what their equipment can do. So a closed loop system we have a high pressure line running into shore, and then a low pressure return line running back out to the pumps.

Scott Bilby: We’re speaking to Greg Allen, he’s the Chief Operating Officer at Carnigie Wave Energy. Greg I’d just like to ask you a question about the technology, you say that given the predictability of swells and stuff like that, you claim it can provide baseload power. Can you tell the audience a bit more about that? 

Greg Allen: The wave resource itself is inherently baseload because it is highly consistent and it’s highly predictable. We’ve been predicting what waves hit our coastline for many years. By being able to predict that resource and predict the size of that resource on any given day, you can then predict the output of the device. So the output from a CETO unit is still variable but on the best wave energy sites around the southern half of Australia and even other jurisdictions in the southern hemisphere there’s 100% availability of one meter waves which is were the CETO unit starts operating. So it starts operating at around one meter wave and then it tops out or flat lines in output at around four metre wave. It’s slightly depends on height and period of the wave but typically it is around one to four meters. Because you’ve got 100% availability of one metre waves at certain sites that means that 100% of the time you can be extracting energy from those waves with a CETO device. That’s were the baseload notion comes from.

Scott Bilby: Are there many sites in Australia where you get that one metre or just that nice range you need. How many sites are there, how many places in Australia can we get this stuff happening?

Greg Allen: Yeah, so they’re around the southern half of Australia. Really any of the south-westerly exposed coastal areas typically have a high availability of one metre waves.

Matthew Wright: And are there any locations on the eastern seaboard that may be suitable for this?

Greg Allen: The eastern seaboard still has pretty good availability of low, of smaller waves, and when we say eastern seaboard, that’s when you come around, and sort of more around Eden and further up from Eden. Because of the shoaling effect you get through Bass Straight and as the swells come around the bottom corner of Victoria, the actual wave energy up towards Eden on the east coast still has still significant wave energy. Once you get up above there, you still get a very high consistency of small wave of, of smaller waves, so around the one to three metre range. But you don’t tend to get as high availability of the higher end wave. What that means is that you would need to look at the technology and adapt the technology to extract more energy from a lower wave environment. That’s not our first priority for the technology; the first priority is to extract the energy from the wave environment that do typically come off the southern ocean. So, yes, it does drop off, it’s still highly consistent but it’s highly consistent at a lower level.

Matthew Wright: And internationally, where do you see these farms being potentially built and have you got any partnerships in place or any such thing to help you do that? 

Greg Allen: Yeah we do. Our northern hemisphere licensee for the technology is EDF *(Energy du France)* 12.03 they’re one of the worlds largest power generators. We in particular we, our relationship is with EDFEN which is their renewable energy division. I think they’ve got around 1200 megawatts of wind installed cluster involved in tidal and now wave and they’ve purchased the rights for the technology to exploit the technology in the northern hemisphere. They’re currently doing a feasibility assessment or a site on Reunion Island, obviously that’s not in the northern hemisphere it’s in the southern hemisphere, but it’s actually a France department. So they’re looking at the feasibility of installing around a five megawatt facility on Reunion Island and they’ve received three million Euro of French Government funding to assist with that feasibility assessment. So we’re looking forward there is a great wave resource in the northern hemisphere. Probably not quite as good as what it is in the southern hemisphere but it is still a phenomenal resource. Energy du France are interested in developing sites both in Europe and the US and then further a field.

Matthew Wright: And what other, like on South America and Africa and through Indonesia are there sites there as well?

Greg Allen: Yeah, so we’ve looked at sites in the southern hemisphere, we’ve certainly looked at sites through places like Costa Rica and then coming down through Chile, obviously New Zealand *jut* (13:37) right down into the high availably southern ocean swells that flow through. So there’s any number of sites and I think the world energy council puts the number at about two terrawatts of available energy from our oceans.

Scott Bilby: Yep, and we noticed that you mentioned EDF there seems to be quite an interest from European large utilities to diversify away from coal and nuclear power. Is this a particular play they’re making to move into waves, or is it just part of the general diversified portfolio? 

Greg Allen: Yeah, I think, I’m not 100% sure what their ultimate motive is, but they’ve been involved in wave energy and ocean energy for a number of years now and they have wind and other forms of renewables. They’ve certainly got a full team and a whole division within their organisation that’s focused on renewable energy and a research division and it’s their research guys that we mainly deal with. They’re certainly interested in exploiting the wave energy technology in the northern hemisphere. They did quite a lot of due diligence on a number of wave energy technologies and ultimately select CETO which for us was a vote of confidence in the CETO technology having a large organisation like EDF doing a world wide scan of technologies and selecting it as the one that they wanted to take forward and put their efforts in. 

Matthew Wright: At Beyond Zero Emissions we’re into fairly large scale generation of zero emission energy, so wind power, solar thermal and of course wave’s a big contender, can you tell us what the sort of scaling potential is for the wave technology. This first plant that you’re building is five megawatts, what sort of time frames and once you get going how quickly can you build plants and at what scale?

Greg Allen: Carnigie hopes it’s infinite but we’re really focused at the moment on doing our commercial demonstration project and getting that five megawatt facility up and running. Which will go a long way to proving or verifying the performance of the device and the system and its ability in terms of its capacity factor so how often it can produce and how consistently it can produce energy. So that’s the immediate focus. We’re also looking at a number of sites where we might then be able to roll the technology out and globally, and typically sites are going to need to be 20 megawatts or greater in terms of an instillation and that really comes down to the economics around the balance of plant infrastructure. Some of the larger costs associated with the technology, the more conventional elements, which is the mooring system and pipeline system to bring the fluid ashore that dictates just the inherent costs of those elements dictates you need a reasonable scale of facility to make that work. So the number of around 50 megawatts would be a typical size that we would be targeting. The five megawatt facility we are building will probably be the last time we build a five megawatt facility, it would be then twenty megawatts and above. Then it’s a matter of them finding sites, and we’ve got a number of sites around Australia now that we have licenses for. So we can look at the sea bed and ascertain the most appropriate location within a larger area to locate a 50 or multiple 50 megawatt facilities and then look at the shoreline crossing, so how to get the pipeline system ashore and then where you put your onshore facility and how you connect to the grid. So they’re the elements that dictate how the technology will be rolled out at scale. So the vision that we have is around 1700mw by 2020.

Matthew Wright: And you talk of a 20 or 50 mw site, can you give us an idea of how many square kilometres of ocean bed that would take?

Greg Allen: Yeah, a 50mw facility occupies around 30 hectares of sea bed.

Scott Bilby: We’re speaking to Greg Allen, he’s the chief operating officer at Carnigie wave energy, Greg, so what’s the, how many sites are there say in the south-west of Australia where they’re getting those good south-westerly winds that have the right kind of wave high and the right kind of conditions on the sea floor, etc, etc, close to populations does that start to really whittle down the number of possible operable sites?

Greg Allen: If you look at it from a resource perspective and we had *RPS medocean* (18:43) do an independent review of the wave energy resource for the southern half of Australia. Obviously you can quantify the resource and you can quantify the length of coast line that’s exposed to that but then the difficult one is then ascertaining how much of that resource is readily accessible. It’s a bit like, the analogy is back to wind where a lot of the good winds sites have been snapped up early and now the wind sites are either lower capacity factor or are a long way from the grid. Which require *augmentation to grid* (19:21) to get the power out. So, if you overlay the factors on the southern half of Australia you end up with a location factor of around 10% of the sites. Which put the number at around 17 gigawatts of accessible wave energy sites across the southern half of Australia, and when we say the southern half we talking from around about Geraldton in Western Australia through to around to Eden on the east coast.

Matthew Wright: Yep, and we’re also interested in your cost reduction trajectories so if you can share with us possibly the sort of costs now for a first of a kind plant and at how many megawatts deployed would you be down to your target cost and what is that for electricity?

Greg Allen: The install capital cost for the first five megawatt project was between 50 and 55 million dollars, so around 10 million dollars a megawatt. That’ll be the most expensive plant we do. The forecast is that because of the mass producible nature of the devices, they really have been designed to be able to be mass produced. And the, so that dictates you need scale we need to be rolling out around about 150mw a year to achieve the types of economy to scale that we envisage in the technology. Most of the economies to scale are around bulk purchasing of the balance of plant equipment and then having consistent work load on the types of vessels and equipment you need to deploy the larger scale deployments. We expect that that would push the capital costs of the system down to around the six to seven million dollars per megawatt mark. That doesn’t translate a lot into a dollars per megawatt hour number though, obviously you’ve got to take operations and maintenance into that so it’s not just recovering the capital invested into the system. So our forecast for once we get to that around 150 megawatts of capacity per year the forecast would be down and competitive where wind currently sits. So down around the 120-140 dollars per megawatt hour of revenue required to justify the investment in the project.

Matthew Wright: Yeah and I see that the capital cost is about 3 times that of wind but you’re potentially producing three times the energy because you’re capacity factor is much higher. Wind we know is around 30% average annual out put.

Greg Allen: Yeah, so our capacity factor is probably more like double wind but it’s just that we’re that gain comes in and then the device, the actual CETO unit, it has to be maintained in terms of seals and then ultimately replaced throughout it’s 20 year life, through the 20 year life of the facility. The actually CETO units are a relatively small proportion of the total cost of the facility. A lot of the cost of the facility as I said, are in the foundations and the piping system, which are designed with a 20 year life to be in there with just periodic maintenance on those elements.

Matthew Wright: And on that, how many jobs are you talking, is that comparable to wind and solar-thermal and those kind of technologies, because a lot of people are interested in the green jobs growth?

Greg Allen: Yeah, so there’s obviously be jobs created through the manufacturing side, in terms of manufacturing the CETO unit and the associate balance of plant equipment which are more conventional traditional manufacturing industries. During the life of the plant there’ll be operation and maintenance and then off shore support required and that will create jobs. And the number is similar to wind, it may be slightly lower than wind in terms of the onshore facility around the onshore part, but slightly higher for the off shore component.

Scott Bilby: Grey, the CETO units, where are they currently being manufactured, and is it likely that that’ll scale up, that’ll be the main place for the manufacture of the units in the future?

Greg Allen: At the moment they’re manufactured in all sorts of places, we really just manufacture the components of the system. So if you break the system down there’s the attachment at the base of the system which is like a large universal joint that enables the pump to move with the motion of the wave. That attachment is being manufactured by a specialist engineering company in Victoria, it’s been designed and manufactured by those clients. The pump unit themselves which in simple terms is essentially a hydraulic cylinder that we’re using three difference manufacturers comparing slightly different variations of materials to select the optimum performance in terms of life cycle performance. At the moment we’re using two east coast suppliers (one from Melbourne, one from Geelong) and an international supplier from France. The tether which is the flexible member that goes between the pump and the buoyant actuator is actually being manufactured in the UK by a specialist rope manufacturer, they manufacture tension members which are typically used in the oil and gas industry for mooring of buoys. Then the core to the technology, which is the buoyant actuator, is manufactured locally in Western Australia using more traditional steel fabrication companies to do the main structure of the buoyant actuator and then specialist plastic manufacturers to do the shell of the buoyant actuator. 

Scott Bilby: We’ve almost run out of time but I’ve got two quick questions. What about seasonal variation, is it winter bias, summer bias or even all year round?

Greg Allen: Yeah it’s slightly winter bias. The variation is probably 25% summer, 30-35% winter. So winter months are autumn/winter and then summer/spring.

Scott Bilby: So winter’s the strongest period?

Greg Allen: Yeah, but only marginally.

Scott Bilby: Okay, that’s pretty good because offsets the sort of the output of solar farms and things like that and wind. Also, finally, with Alan Burns the inventor, can you tell us when he actually came up with this idea and where he was at the time?

Greg Allen: Yeah, he was diving and it was in about 1975 and he was watching kelp move on the bottom of the ocean and he conceived the idea of why try to restrain the energy of the ocean and lets make something that can mimic the motion of the ocean and extract the energy.

Scott Bilby: That’s fantastic. Greg, thank you for allowing us interview you today.

Greg Allen: Not a problem. Thanks for the time.

Scott Bilby: We’ve just been speaking to Greg Alan, Chief Operating Officer at Carnigie Wave Energy, a West Australia based company building a commercial demonstration wave project using fully submerged wave power converters. 

Matthew Wright: For more information on Carnigie, website is carnigiewave.com.