Waves to watts: converting wave power to electricity

Climate change and coastal erosion are two big, intractable problems facing Australia. Fortunately, the University of Adelaide’s wave power research group offers an innovative approach to solve both issues. 

Scientists around the world are highlighting the urgent need for action to limit the devastating consequences of climate change, which makes renewable energy innovation increasingly important. In Australia, where much of our population lives coastally, the threats of the climate crisis are exacerbating the ongoing problem of coastal erosion and its impact on homes and important infrastructure. 

Wave power could provide a two-in-one solution to these dual issues. Researchers at the University of Adelaide are developing ground-breaking technology to create wave farms that will simultaneously harness wave energy efficiently and minimise waves’ destructive potential.

For more than a decade, the University has been at the forefront of devising ways to capture and convert the enormous – but often overlooked – renewable energy potential held in ocean waves.

“Wave energy is available almost 24/7, as opposed to wind or solar,” said Dr Nataliia Sergiienko from the University’s Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Resources (ISER).

“Adding wave energy to the renewable energy mix is beneficial for the national grid.” Dr Nataliia Sergiienko

Some of the biggest leaps forward made by Sergiienko and her colleagues, Professor Ben Cazzolato, Associate Professor Boyin Ding, Professor Maziar Arjomandi, and Associate Professor Luke Bennetts, were in design changes to a wave power prototype called CETO–– where the team’s adjustments doubled the device’s energy efficiency. They’re also currently developing a soon-to-be-deployed control system to maximise CETO’s capacity. 

“The advanced controller that our group developed has already been tested in the tank and demonstrated a significant increase in generated power as compared to other state-of-the art controllers,” said Sergiienko. 

The researchers worked in partnership with company Carnegie Clean Energy to take these bold steps in optimising wave power as a renewable energy technology. Along the way, they also discovered an important secondary benefit of wave farms.  

“Wave energy converters work by removing energy from waves, which significantly decreases the height of waves that propagate towards the shore,” said Sergiienko. “This ‘feature’ could potentially be used to protect vulnerable coastlines of any coastal country, such as Australia.”

To explore this facet of wave farm development, the researchers partnered with Swinburne University of Technology, University of New South Wales, Mid West Ports in WA, and Moyne Shire Council in Victoria.

The group is exploring never-before-answered questions about how wave farm design could stop or change the direction of waves, potentially protecting against storm erosion and reducing downtime in ports. 

“Interestingly, these questions had not been answered previously, and we have made significant progress in our research through numerical and experimental testing,” Sergiienko said.

Not content to solve just two difficult problems, the team is also investigating how wave energy converters could protect offshore infrastructure from damage, such as wind farms located in the ocean. This collaboration, appropriately, reaches across the oceans, with the Adelaide researchers leading the Australia-China Joint Research Centre of Offshore Wind and Wave Energy Harnessing, which includes Shanghai Jiao Tong University, five Australian universities, and two industry partners. 

The team’s work, which has potential to create a more sustainable and better-protected world, is supported by grant funding from the Australian Department of Industry, Innovation and Science; the Australian Research Council’s Early Career Industry Fellowships scheme; and the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Program. 

What's next?

With further optimisation, wave energy could provide easy and sustainable access to power for remote communities through micro-grids, serve as the engine of utility-scale power plants, and be useful for smaller scale applications like aquafarms and navigation buoys. 

However, wave energy is a new technology, so its possible applications and potential are as vast as the ocean itself. 

“I would like to see more wave energy devices moving from labs to open ocean,” Sergiienko says. 

“We still have many research questions to be answered.”