Climate

New Jersey could become an ocean energy hub

A first-in-the-nation bill would support wave and tidal energy as a way to meet the Garden State's climate goals.

An ocean wave.

Technological challenges mean wave and tidal power remain generally more expensive than their other renewable counterparts. But government support could help spur more innovation that brings down cost.

Photo: Jeremy Bishop via Unsplash

Move over, solar and wind. There’s a new kid on the renewable energy block: waves and tides.

Harnessing the ocean’s power is still in its early stages, but the industry is poised for a big legislative boost, with the potential for real investment down the line.

A New Jersey bill introduced this week would make the state the first in the U.S. to throw government support behind ocean energy. It would direct the state’s utility board to both initiate a study of generating power from waves and tides (they’re different, but more on that in a second), and simultaneously support ocean energy pilot projects. The bill isn’t just focused on studies and pilots, though; it calls for the board to produce a plan for deploying these technologies and potentially offering financial incentives as well.

The bill doesn’t provide funds for the fledgling technology at this point, but the state’s 2023 budget — signed into law Thursday — includes $500,000 dedicated to a feasibility study and pilot program for ocean-based energy, opening the door for New Jersey to continue to ride the wave energy … wave.

With the legislation, “New Jersey serves as a model to all states seeking to bring new forms of renewable energy into the future,” said Democrat Assemblyman Robert Karabinchak, who introduced the bill. The state has set a 2050 net zero goal, and Karabinchak said that wave and tidal energy could help make progress toward that North Star.

There’s a subtle difference between tidal and wave energy. In broad strokes, the former uses the push and pull of the tides themselves to push a paddle or spin a turbine and convert its flow into electricity, while wave energy relies upon the thrust of often-unpredictable surface waves to do so.

According to the Energy Information Administration, waves off the coast of the country are churning out 2.64 trillion kilowatt hours of untapped energy. That’s equivalent to 66% of U.S. electricity generation in 2020.

Wave energy has been around as a concept since 1799, when Pierre-Simon Girard filed a patent in his native France for using the waves “like motors” for simple machines like pumps. Modern wave energy converter technology, however, didn’t see its debut until the 1940s, when Japanese navy commander Yoshio Masuda created a wave-fueled navigation buoy that was ultimately sold commercially in the 1960s. Yet despite early work and the promise of abundant energy, the ocean presents challenges and surprises that have made it hard to tap.

“The problem is that these converters have to operate in very harsh environments,” said Muhammad Hajj, chair of the civil, environmental and ocean engineering department at the Stevens Institute. “You could design something to harness the energy of a 3-meter wave … but if the wave height becomes 8 meters, how will it respond?”

These technological challenges mean wave and tidal power remain generally more expensive than their other renewable counterparts. But government support could help spur more innovation that brings down costs.

The New Jersey legislation would provide a path to include the nascent ocean-based energy technologies in the state’s energy master plan, released once per decade. The 2019 installment pushed for the state to develop renewable technologies such as offshore wind, solar and storage, but made no mention of ocean power.

While the bill’s fate is anything but certain, the mere fact of its existence is encouraging to Inna Braverman, founder and CEO of Eco Wave Power. Her company has developed technology that converts wave power to electricity directly at breakwaters.

“I really believe that not only [will it] enable us to implement projects in New Jersey, which has amazing wave conditions, but also other states will follow,” she told Protocol.

Both Braverman and Hajj testified at a New Jersey Assembly committee hearing on the topic back in March, where Braverman characterized the response from both sides of the aisle as enthusiastic.

Various companies have tried to harvest energy from waves in recent years, but most have yet to succeed. That includes the high-profile failure of Ocean Power in 2014, which dealt with cost overruns and other challenges.That’s meant that waves have lagged behind both wind and the sun for generating electricity. Braverman attributes some of these to the fact that early efforts were far offshore.

“Not only is it expensive to install offshore, but … you get waves with a height of 20 meters. And no man-made stationary equipment can really withstand the load of a 20-meter wave height,” Braverman said. It became difficult to fund and insure these earlier projects, not to mention build the transmission lines to connect them to the grid.

In contrast, Eco Wave Power connects its technology to existing man-made structures — piers, breakwaters, jetties and other marine structures — in order to keep overall construction costs low and avoid the practical pitfalls of the open ocean. The company has two operational projects, one at the Port of Gibraltar and one in Israel, and several more in the pipeline.

Today, Eco Wave Power is focused primarily on the U.S. and European markets, Braverman said, which differ in large part because Europe already has regulations and legislation in place that enable the easy entrance of new wave projects while the U.S. does not — yet.

“We really need to introduce new renewable energy sources in order to really be able to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2050,” she said. “And I truly believe that wave energy can be the solution for that. New Jersey is just the start.”

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins