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Hi, I am Belinda Batten
I am the director of the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center
which I'll call NNMREC for short
so one of the strengths of uh... NNMREC
is our test facilities
and our strong research groups
in marine energy. We're very excited to open our first ocean test facility this summer in
Newport Oregon and we had a developer out there with us testing a device called
the "Wet nz"
We're sitting in front of one of the test facilities that we have at Oregon State University
That'a a tsunami wave basin
which can do
three-dimensional testing of marine
renewable devices.
The wave energy technology that
Columbia Power is developing has
the ability to capture
wave energy
in all sea climates
the way that the system captures the energy is through
capturing both the heave motion is which is the up and down motion of the wave
and also the serge motion
which is the horizontal motion that you might feel if you're in the water with the
wave
either pulls you toward it or
pushes you away.
The staff at Columbia Power is
always enjoyed working with Oregon State University
all of our engineers are OSU grads
it is just uh...
real fun experience with
when we work on projects together. One of the roles that NNMREC can play in industry partnership
is that we are a natural place
because of our
charge from US Department of Energy to facilitate commercialization.
Since companies around the world know that what we are
renowned test facility and research facility
through that
we can bring in a group of
developers a group of industry
that the University hasn't worked with before
We had an "ahhahh" moment
on how the design needed to change
to make more electricity
at a lower cost
we were then able to make performance gains of about 200%
Those changes were
then tested again at OSU's Tsunami Wave basin
and once again led to more learning and
more development
To where we are now testing version 3.3
that has another 50% increase in energy capture above and beyond that
These incremental stages of learning has really paid off
Engineers job's are to take science and apply it to real world problems
and without a chance
for that real application, I think the students
do not have as rich of an experience.
Industry-university partnerships enrich the lives of everyone involved
it enriches the lives of the faculty members it enriches the lives of the students
it enriches the lives of the industry
and through all that it brings economic development to the state.