How much the delay costs remains to be seen. But on its last full day in office, the Trump administration gave Oregon State University a long-awaited lease in federal waters. It’s expected to pave the way for on-time construction of a $73.5 million wave energy test center, though not without adjustments.
PacWave South is envisioned as the ultimate proving ground for testing wave energy converters, offering developers four permitted testing berths each capable of handling up to five devices, in what scientists call “one of the most consistently energetic wave environments in the world.”
The vast bulk of the funding is lined up, and the project has cleared its major regulatory hurdles. But before beginning offshore work, it needed a lease from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, a Department of the Interior agency, in order to get a construction and operation license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
The lease went through on Tuesday — more than two months after OSU President F. King Alexander wrote a letter to Interior Secretary David Bernhardt pleading with him to finalize a matter BOEM itself had apparently approved in early August.
“I urge your attention to the DOI’s important but time-sensitive review of the PacWave South lease agreement,” Alexander wrote. “If the marine construction start date of April 2021 is missed, construction will be delayed by a year which will add significant costs to the project.”
April through September, when the seas are calmer, is the time of the year to do the key work on the project — horizontal directional drilling to create the conduit for the subsea cables that will connect the test center, 6 nautical miles off Newport, to the shore.
While Alexander told Barnhardt that missing that window would set the project back a year, Dan Hellin, PacWave South’s deputy director, said project leaders and their contractor have since figured out a way to stay on course to complete the project in 2022 and have it open for testing in 2023: They’ll brave potentially rough fall and winter conditions.
“It’s a little more complicated and a little more expensive, but the work can be done through the fall and into the winter,” Hellin said.
How much more expensive? Hellin declined to say, adding that it will depend on how severe the weather is.
Hellin was diplomatic in discussing the Department of Interior’s slow action on the lease.
“We’ve been involved in permitting for seven and half years and there have been a number of delays,” he said. “It’s really just the nature of the beast.”
He noted, though, that if the delay were due to questions Interior had, the department never asked them of PacWave South. That left the university president pleading and project leaders waiting and hoping.
They had begun to think the matter would fall to the new administration. Then word came this week.
“We got a call late (Tuesday) letting us know that the lease
documents had been FedExed,” Hellin said. “It was a nice surprise.”
