Abstract
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office launched the Waves to Water Prize, initiated in 2019 and concluded in 2022, to encourage the development of small, modular, cost-competitive wave-powered desalination systems and to accelerate research endeavors for wave energy converters (WECs) capable of providing clean water in disaster relief scenarios. To better understand some of the challenges in developing a WEC, while following many of the constraints the competitors in the prize challenge were held to, the prize offered an opportunity for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to design and develop a test article, referred to as the hydraulic and electric reverse osmosis (HERO) WEC. There were many lessons learned throughout the design, fabrication, and testing of the HERO WEC device. These takeaways have led to a better understanding of the research needs in wave energy, which are difficult to learn in a modeling and simulation environment. The intent of this report is to provide the public with a summary of the electrical subsystem designed for the HERO WEC as well as highlight the technical limitations of fabricating a WEC with a reliable electrical power take-off at this scale.