Daniel Englander

FERC Gives It Up To Finavera February 15, 2008 at 12:35 PM

The Federal Energy Regulatory Committee has finally succumbed to Jason Bak. Bak, CEO of wave power company Finavera, used champagne and the promise of an extensive fish safety survey to convince FERC to grant a preliminary permit for Finavera’s proposed 100 MW wave park off of Humboldt County. FERC is widely reviled in the U.S. ocean power community for being tease, despite everyone knowing the regulatory agency gave it up to Verdant Power in the back of its Camaro on Roosevelt Island a few years ago.

Finavera’s Humboldt project could become the U.S.’s first commercial wave project. This sounds like good news for PG&E, which recently signed a PPA for 2.3 MW from the Finavera installation. But is it really?

Finavera isn’t without its share of troubles. The company’s prototype AquaBuOY 2.0 took on water and sank off the coast of Oregon in September. Ordinarily we’d chalk this up to technology testing, but the water leak exposed a critical flaw in the AquaBuOY’s technology. The point absorber buoy uses a pressurized hose pump to suck water through a Pelton turbine in the buoy’s head, which generates electricity. In other words, the buoy is supposed to take on water. In this case it took on way, way too much.

The question now is whether or not Finavera has resolved this flaw? Somehow I highly doubt Jason Bak has been hard at work welding buoys at the Oregon Iron Works. More likely, he’s had been hard at work building wind capacity to raise money for his new wave park. The problem is that Finavera needs to do both in order to fulfill this fantasy - the AquaBuOY weighs in at a mean 250 kW and their only one is at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

Bak’s response? “Goonies never say die.”

Bak and the Finavera team watching the AquaBuOY sink

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