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66 www.resourceworld.com A P R I L / M A Y 2 0 1 7 Developments in Green Technology by Jane Bratun GREEN TECHNOLOGIES TURNING OCEAN WAVES INTO ELECTRICITY The Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center (NNMREC), a partnership between Oregon State University (OSU) and the University of Washington, has been awarded up to US $40 million by the US Department of Energy (DOE) to create the world's pre- mier, ocean wave energy, test facility in Newport, Oregon. The DOE award is sub- ject to appropriations, federal officials said, and it will be used to design, obtain permits and to construct an open-water, grid-connected national wave energy testing facility. It will include four grid- connected test berths. According to NNMREC, studies esti- mate that if a small portion of the energy available from waves is recovered, millions of homes could be powered. In making the award, the DOE noted that more than 50% of the US population lives within 50 miles of coastlines, offering America the poten- tial to develop a domestic wave energy industry that could help provide reliable power to coastal regions. The NNMREC facility, known as the Pacific Marine Energy Center South Energy Test Site, is scheduled to be opera- tional by 2020. It will test wave energy converters that harness ocean wave energy and turn it into electricity. "We anticipate this will be the world's most advanced wave energy test facility," said Belinda Batten, Director of NNMREC and a pro- fessor at the OSU College of Engineering. Batten said, "These devices have to per- form in hostile ocean conditions, stand up to a 100-year storm, be energy effi- cient, durable, environmentally benign and perhaps most important, cost-com- petitive with other energy sources. This facility will help answer all of those ques- tions and is literally the last step before commercialization." TURNING WASTEWATER INTO ENERGY The average North American household flushes one full tank of hot water down the drain each day, according to International Wastewater Systems (IWS) [IWS-CSE; INTWF-OTC; IWI-FSE], based in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, a suburb of Vancouver. In a city of 1 mil- lion homes, that is equivalent to approximately $500,000 in energy from natural gas casually flowing into our city sewers daily. To tap this energy, IWS has created the SHARC system, which filters raw sew- age and extracts heat using geothermal heat pumps and chillers. The heat pumps, named PIRANHA, are self-contained and use a direct expansion heat exchanger to extract thermal energy from a building's wastewater. Reliable, trouble-free operation is the major challenge in recovering heat from waste water. The SHARC system is designed to be clog-proof with an auto- matic back flush to filter sewage simply and effectively. It has full backup capac- ity with zero down time and is available in heat exchange or heat pump applications. In 2012, IWS installed a sewage waste- water heat exchange system in the 60-unit Seven35 condominium complex in North Vancouver, BC. At 500% efficiency and an annual greenhouse gas emission reduc- tion of 150 tonnes, the system heated the domestic hot water for the development's 60 homes and contributed to earning