Marine Energy Conferences Bring Together Researchers, Stakeholders and Developers

After a successful season of testing marine hydrokinetic energy devices, ACEP’s Pacific Marine Energy Center team recently attended two weeks of conferences and workshops in Portland, Oregon, and Santa Barbara, California.

During Sept. 12-15, 2022, the conferences in Oregon included the which hosted the marine hydrokinetic researchers from the three universities that make up the partnership: University of Washington, Oregon State University and University of 91��Ƶ Fairbanks.

In addition, the University Marine Energy Research Community and the Marine Energy Technology Symposium jointly hosted conference was held in conjunction with the, providing an opportunity to meet with marine energy developers and stakeholders.

ACEP’s Emily Browning presented two posters based on her Ph.D. research titled “Up-sampling Hydrokinetic Resource Data to Model Electrical Output from a Current Energy Converter” (Browning, J. Kasper, and P. Cicilio) and “A Grid-Based Interpolation Procedure for Turbulence Analysis in Riverine Settings” (Browning, P. Duvoy, E. Brown, J. Kasper, and J. Johnson).

Baxter Bond presented both a poster and an oral presentation. The poster is titled “High-torque Low-speed Test Stand for Current Energy Converter Generator Testing”(B. Bond and B. Loeffler). The oral presentation was “The Economic and Energy Feasibility of Installing Wave Energy Converters in Yakutat, AK” (B. Bond, J. Kasper, S. Jump, P. Duvoy, and B. Loeffler).

ACEP’s PMEC researchers also attended two data management and processing workshops during the OREC. The Marine Energy Data Pipeline workshop highlighted a data ingestion tool called, which was developed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. This open-source Python library and framework for standardizing time-series datasets follows data standards and best practices from the U.S. Department of Energy’s program is designed to help users read, process, run quality control and convert raw data to standard formats, with the goal of reducing the time spent on data wrangling while producing high-quality standardized datasets.

The Marine and Hydrokinetic Toolkit workshop explored an open-source software package developed in Python and Matlab that includes modules for ingesting, quality controlling, processing, visualizing and managing marine energy data. Functionality and demonstrations included processing tidal data, performing wave resource assessments and characterizing power performance.

During the week of Sept 19-23, 2022, and in a different part of the U.S. West Coast, Eloise Brown and Heike Merkel attend a workshop, Scalable and Computationally Reproducible Approaches to Arctic Research, hosted by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. This five-day workshop introduced advanced topics in computationally reproducible research working with very large datasets. Software and techniques including working with Python in cloud-computing environments, docker containers and parallel processing using tools like parsl and dask. Methods for documentation and archive to the Arctic Data Center, responsible research and data management practices including data sovereignty and the, and ethical concerns with data-intensive modeling and analysis were also covered.

For more information on PMEC’s research, please contact Heike Merkel at hmerkel@alaska.edu.

ACEP's Pacific Marine Energy Center co-director, Ben Loeffler, presents during the joint and conference in Portland, Oregon. Photo by Emily Browning.