Connecting people to the power of the ocean.
PMEC is a consortium of universities focused on the responsible advancement of marine renewable energy by expanding scientific understanding, engaging stakeholders, and educating students.
Researchers from the University of Washington, Oregon State University, and University of Alaska Fairbanks work closely with marine energy technology developers, academic and National Laboratory researchers, coastal community members, ocean users, federal and state regulators, and other government officials to address key challenges in the sector and accelerate its emergence.
PMEC serves as an objective voice regarding the opportunities, capabilities, and effects of marine energy, including wave, tidal, riverine, and offshore wind resources.
PMEC News
PMEC Director Brian Polagye is quoted in a Wall Street Journal article about marine energy investment.
PMEC Director Brian Polagye is quoted in a Geekwire article on wave energy technology and the entrepreneurs at Oscilla and Columbia Power testing their new large-scale devices.
Congratulations to Trent Dillon, Ali Trueworthy and Katherine Van Ness, three PMEC students chosen as ORISE WPTO-MHK Graduate Student Research Program fellows for 2021. The U.S. Department of Energy’s ORISE fellowship partners high performing graduate students with national labs and private industry to focus on early-stage research and development.
PMEC Co-director Bryson Robertson is quoted in a Popular Science article on wave energy.
VICE News visits Oregon to learn about America’s push to develop renewable wave energy technologies.
Competing against some of the best schools in the country, multi-disciplinary student teams from the University of Washington and Oregon State University came away with four awards in the 2021 Marine Energy Collegiate Competition (MECC).
The story of one student’s journey to build a swarm of robotic devices for underwater mapping.
Black Lives Matter Protests outside of Memorial Union at Oregon State University
Two teams of PMEC students - one from Oregon State University and the other from the University of Washington - are among the 17 teams selected to compete in the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2021 Marine Energy Collegiate Competition (MECC).
Projects
A new survey of 2,000 California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia residents gives insights about west coast residents’ knowledge of, and attitudes towards, wave energy.
This summer PMEC graduate students participated in the Project Blue@Summer program; virtually mentoring high school interns through the process of writing an ocean energy-related research paper.
Video interviews discuss how PMEC researchers contribute to the larger social conversation about wave energy and social issues related to its use in coastal communities.
Just because it performs in the flume, doesn’t mean it’ll perform in open water. PMEC experiments are helping to accurately extrapolate lab data to commercial scale.
PMEC researchers are modeling and analyzing farms of floating oscillating water column wave energy converters to better understand the best ways to deploy and operate them in ocean conditions.
PMEC social scientist Shana Hirsch studies the renewable energy industry in Scotland, where marine technologies dominate, as a lens for innovation ecosystems and energy transitions across Europe and around the globe.
PMEC researchers are synthesizing existing information and conducting additional field sampling on fish populations near Yakutat, Alaska, in preparation for a potential wave energy installation.
The µFloat project (pronounced “microFloat”) is an underwater float - a trackable, drifting sensor package - that is inexpensive enough to be deployed in swarms to perform simultaneous, distributed measurements in energetic tidal currents.
A series of experiments in the Alice C. Tyler flume at the University of Washington assessed performance of a cross-flow turbine under speed- or torque-regulated flow.
Sound produced by marine energy converters may be audible to marine life, but measuring these sounds is difficult. DAISYs are our answer: low-cost, accurate instrumentation specifically built for marine energy sites.
banner video provided by James Joslin
