{"id":18693,"date":"2026-08-30T07:30:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T11:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/?p=18693"},"modified":"2026-08-29T18:54:29","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T22:54:29","slug":"oregon-berths-no-machines-france-throws-it-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.autonocion.com\/us\/oregon-berths-no-machines-france-throws-it-away\/","title":{"rendered":"A 46-ton steel cylinder rocks end over end in the Atlantic 17 miles off the French coast, sloshing a water pendulum that squeezes air through a turbine with no gearbox and no magnets in it, and all 200 kilowatts it makes are dumped, because no cable runs to shore"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oregon State University marked the opening of PacWave South on Thursday with an invitation-only event. The Associated Press reported the day before<\/a> that the site, seven miles off Newport, has four berths, close to $150 million of federal money in the ground, and no wave energy machine in the water. Developers are held up by delays in federal funding. Nobody has anything to plug in yet.<\/p>\n

France has the reverse of that problem. Seaturns, a Bordeaux company founded in 2015, put a 49-foot steel cylinder into the Atlantic 17 miles off the Port of Le Verdon at the mouth of the Gironde estuary, and announced on June 9<\/a> that it was running. The cylinder weighs 46 tons. Its turbine is rated at 200 kilowatts.<\/p>\n

All of that output gets thrown away.<\/p>\n

The waves shove it sideways and the mooring does the rest<\/h2>\n

The S1 measures 49 feet long and 20 feet across, carries 46 tons of steel (42 metric tons in Seaturns’ own figures), and shows only 10 to 11 feet of itself above the surface. Swell pushes the cylinder back and forth horizontally, a motion engineers call surge. Seaturns’ patented mooring converts that shoving into pitch, so the cylinder rocks end over end rather than sliding around on the spot.<\/p>\n

The cylinder holds a water pendulum and two air chambers at the top, split by a vertical divider running along its axis. Rocking sloshes the pendulum. The pendulum squeezes each air chamber in turn, and the moving air spins a turbine coupled straight to a generator. No hydraulic rams, no gearbox, no linear generator packed with rare-earth magnets.<\/p>\n

The whole conversion chain sits in one power take-off module at the top of the hull, and during first-phase testing at the port of Nantes Saint-Nazaire a small crew pulled that module and put it back inside two hours with light equipment, according to Seaturns. Contractor MECASOUD built the entire demonstrator in six months.<\/p>\n

Two other full-scale machines are working the Atlantic right now, and neither one moves like this. CorPower’s C4 off Agu\u00e7adoura is a fat buoy roughly 30 feet across that heaves up and down<\/a> on a taut line, weighs about 60 metric tons and has peaked around 600 kilowatts into the Portuguese grid. The MARMOK-A-5 off Bilbao is an upright spar 140 feet tall<\/a> that displaces about 160 metric tons and feeds roughly 30 kilowatts into the Spanish grid. Seaturns lies flat and rocks.<\/p>\n

Seaturns spent a decade climbing to this size, running models at 1\/30, 1\/10 and 1\/4 scale with European universities and the French marine research institute Ifremer. The 1:10 prototype was tested in Cantabria, in northern Spain. The quarter-scale unit went to sea on Ifremer’s test site. One design choice carries over to the commercial version: the mooring is shared, at two anchors for every 10 floaters, which is a very different seabed footprint from a wind farm where each turbine gets its own foundation.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
Length<\/div>\n
49 ft<\/div>\n
15 meters of steel cylinder, 20 feet across.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Weight<\/div>\n
46 tons<\/div>\n
42 metric tons in Seaturns’ own figures.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Rated output<\/div>\n
200 kW<\/div>\n
Nominal figure for the S1 demonstrator.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Distance offshore<\/div>\n
17 miles<\/div>\n
27.5 km from the Port of Le Verdon, Gironde estuary.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Exported to a grid<\/div>\n
0 kW<\/div>\n
The trial runs off-grid. Everything produced is dissipated.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
TARGET<\/div>\n
Mauritius pilot<\/div>\n
2 MW<\/div>\n
Grid-connected array, with a route to 10 MW.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Nothing it makes reaches a wall socket<\/h2>\n

Seaturns states the off-grid part in the June release itself, in the same section as the certification pitch: the demonstrator produces electricity and that electricity is dissipated. No export cable runs to the beach. The company logs turbine output and floater behavior in real time instead, correlated against sea conditions measured by a separate wave buoy, and an environmental monitoring program covers the full length of the campaign.<\/p>\n

Trials Manager Arthur Chauliac said “the floater is fully instrumented and subject to comprehensive operational monitoring,” and described an installation carried out in two stages, mooring line first and floater second.<\/p>\n

One number in that release does not agree with another. The opening paragraph puts the campaign at a minimum of twelve months. Chauliac, further down the same page, says eighteen. Seaturns is aiming for technology certification by the middle of 2027, which sits more comfortably against the longer figure than the shorter one.<\/p>\n

Mauritius is where Seaturns expects to get paid<\/h2>\n

The company won Round 3 of NSEPCRET, a call for projects run by the Mauritius Renewable Energy Agency, which comes with a power purchase agreement from the Central Electricity Board, the island’s national utility. Seaturns announced that project on March 11<\/a>. The first phase is a 2 MW array wired into the Mauritian grid, with another 8 MW to follow if the pilot performs, and Taylor Smith Group, a Mauritian maritime industrial group founded in 1856, would build the floaters locally.<\/p>\n

Seaturns describes the array as the world’s first pre-commercial offshore wave energy farm connected to a national grid. That is the company’s own framing, and it is scoped tightly: offshore, pre-commercial, farm, national grid. Single machines got there long before any farm did. CorPower’s C4 has been exporting to the Portuguese grid since October 2023, and the MARMOK-A-5 first pushed power into the Spanish grid in December 2016.<\/p>\n

Keep the two power figures apart. The cylinder off the Gironde is a 200-kilowatt demonstrator. Seaturns’ commercial product starts at 2 MW, ten times that, and the company says it wants several commercial pilot farms running by 2030. A funding round is planned for early 2027 to carry the technology from TRL 6 to TRL 8.<\/p>\n

Ireland’s state power company is reading over their shoulder<\/h2>\n

ESB signed on as an industrial partner for the trial, monitoring the key stages and taking access to technical data and live performance results. Ireland has one of the largest exploitable wave resources in Europe, up to 19 GW according to the Evolve project, and the 2024 SEAI technology roadmap puts 4 GW and 14 TWh a year on the table by 2050 in its significant wave energy scenario. ESB has tracked the sector for years under its Net Zero by 2040 strategy and named Seaturns in its 2025 emerging technology report.<\/p>\n

Cahir O’Neill, an emerging technology specialist at ESB, named the two problems the leading projects have to solve: riding out storms, and getting enough structure out of every ton of steel to make the economics work.<\/p>\n

Seaturns has a partial answer on the first one. Quarter-scale hardware came through storm Ciar\u00e1n, and the company says that corresponds to 46-foot waves at full scale. That is a scaled equivalence rather than a measurement taken on the 46-ton machine, and the machine itself went into the water in June. The Bay of Biscay has not thrown a winter at it yet.<\/p>\n

America has the berths and is waiting on the machines<\/h2>\n

PacWave South<\/a> can host up to 20 converters across four berths for a combined 20 megawatts, each berth wired with its own cable to shore, under a 25-year FERC license. The Department of Energy has put close to $150 million into siting and building it since 2016, and federal estimates cited by the AP put the marine energy resource at about 57% of US electricity demand.<\/p>\n

The site is pre-permitted for point absorbers, oscillating water columns and attenuators. Seaturns drives an air turbine the way an oscillating water column does, out of a hull that pitches like nothing on that list.<\/p>\n

The Energy Department is also selling wave power on grounds it denies offshore wind, calling the technology “uniquely suited to provide power sources for national security applications” and pointing at remote sensors, autonomous underwater vehicles and forward bases. The Navy already runs a grid-connected wave site in Hawaii. PacWave is the first one tied to the continental grid, and PacWave Director Dan Hellin told the AP that the shortage of facilities like it is the real bottleneck for the global industry.<\/p>\n

The machine first in line for a berth off Oregon<\/a>, CalWave’s submerged unit, has still not left the dock. Seaturns has no announced plans for Oregon.<\/p>\n

Seaturns has not said when the first floater goes in the water at Mauritius. The company has been specific about what it needs first: certification data by the middle of 2027, and a funding round it intends to open in early 2027. Both of those ride on a cylinder that has to get through a Biscay winter it has not seen. It went in with a minimum of twelve months on the clock, and Seaturns announced the deployment on June 9, 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oregon State University marked the opening of PacWave South on Thursday with an invitation-only event. The Associated Press reported the … <\/p>\n

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