Energy Department awards AquaHarmonics Wave Energy Prize
The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) awarded Oregon-based AquaHarmonics its Wave Energy Prize to facilitate the development of technology to convert energy from waves into electricity.
The award is the culmination of an 18-month design-build-test competition that comes with a grand prize of $1.5 million.
The Wave Energy Prize focuses on the development of wave energy converters that aims to reduce the cost of wave energy. Although the wave energy sector is in its early stages of development, the hope is that one day it will provide clean, reliable and cost-effective energy for many communities near coastlines in the United States.
“This competition set a difficult threshold of doubling the energy captured from ocean waves, and four teams surpassed that goal. AquaHarmonics’ technology leap incentivized by the Energy Department demonstrates how rapid innovation can be achieved in a public prize challenge,” Lynn Orr, the DOE’s Under Secretary for Science and Energy, said.
Second place winner CalWave Power Technologies will receive $500,000, and third place Waveswing America won $250,000 in seed funding to build scaled prototypes of their proposed converter devices.
The DOE said the prize has already facilitated innovation in the technologies and next year, the Energy Department will publish data from test results of all the finalist teams to further accelerate advancement of this sector.
