earth science

Ocean Renewable Power Company

Ocean Renewable Power Company is a earth science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Ocean Renewable Power Company rather than just read about it. In short: Ocean Renewable Power Company (ORPC, Inc.) is an American marine renewable energy company based in Portland, Maine. The company develops technologies which generate electricity from tidal, river, and ocean currents.

Key takeaways

Ocean Renewable Power Company belongs to earth science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Ocean Renewable Power Company to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Ocean Renewable Power Company from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Ocean Renewable Power Company (ORPC, Inc.) is an American marine renewable energy company based in Portland, Maine. The company develops technologies which generate electricity from tidal, river, and ocean currents. The turbines are a cross-flow design in the helix shape of DNA with the axis of rotation perpendicular to the flow of water and work on the same principle as water wheels. As water flows, the turbine foils spin in the same direction, producing mechanical power that a permanent magnet generator converts to electricity, and then sends to the electrical grid via an underwater power cable and onshore power station. The TidGen® Power System (for tidal currents) and RivGen® Power System (for river and shallow tidal currents) are the company's trademarked systems.

History The genesis of ORPC began in 2004, when a cruise ship industry executive, Paul Wells, queried whether there was a way to generate electricity from ocean currents like the Gulf Stream. He teamed up with two others, a structural engineer, Christopher R. Sauer, and a third co-founder with a financial background. In 2007, with input from the U.S. Navy, ORPC launched a 46 ft long, horizontal cross-flow turbine prototype in Cobscook Bay, Maine, which proved technically feasible. In 2010, the company's 60-kilowatt tidal turbine began providing grid-compatible electricity to the Eastport, Maine, U.S. Coast Guard station's utility boat. ORPC pursued and won the first contract with the Maine Public Utilities Commission to provide up to 5 megawatts of tidal power in April 2012. ORPC will receive 21.5 cents per kilowatt-hour produced, which is higher than the fluctuating price paid to producers on the open electricity market. They determined that the economic benefits that would accrue to the state would be a factor of 1.8, meaning more money would be returned to the Maine economy through jobs and taxes than was being invested in the higher rate paid. Maine's state senate president, Kevin Raye, described the deal as a major milestone "in the 80-year effort to commercially harness the vast power of the tides”. The company installed an underwater turbine to use tidal currents to generate renewable energy. The unit was installed on the ocean floor at the company's Federal Energy Regulatory Commission-licensed Cobscook Bay project site, in Eastport and Lubec, Maine. The project transmitted the first electricity ever delivered to a utility-scale grid from an ocean resource in North or South America in September 2012. A $21 million project, the Cobscook Bay Project was funded almost equally between private and public sources, with the United States Department of Energy providing a $10 million research grant. The project produced enough electricity for 25 homes. Said Jose Zayas, director of the Wind and Water Power Technologies Office at the Department of Energy, "These first pioneering projects are complicated (and) really breaking new ground." Said Paul Jacobson, an ocean energy expert at the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Electric Power Research Institute. "With this project, these tidal power devices have finally crossed the threshold into commercial development." "The project, which injected $14 million into the local economy and has supported more than 100 local and supply chain jobs, represents the first tidal energy project in the United States with long-term contracts to sell electricity." Starting in 2013, ORPC submitted annual environmental monitoring reports for the Cobscook Bay Tidal Energy Project to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission with findings from acoustic, marine mammal and fish species studies along with other environmental impacts, which the company indicated had no adverse impact on the marine environment of Cobscook Bay." ORPC is developing the autonomous turbine generator unit (ATGU), a roving subsea power generation module capable of self-propelling, self-deploying and retrieving, and providing a power supply to subsea vehicles and monitoring systems, and performing underwater missions such as heavy lifts, inspections, and robotic operations. This project is supported by the US Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) program. Founder and CEO Christopher R. Sauer retired in 2020, after 16 years of service to the company. Stuart Davies now leads the company as CEO. ORPC has expanded its operations globally, establishing three subsidiaries: ORPC Canada (Montreal, 2015), ORPC Ireland LLC (Dublin, 2015), and ORPC Chile SpA (Punta Arenas, 2021).

Recognition Along with 17 other high-tech small businesses and 3 individuals, ORPC received a Tibbetts Award from the U.S. Small Business Administration in Washington, D.C., in May 2013. The award honors companies and individuals nationwide, "who are beacons of promise and models of excellence in high technology." ORPC was the first marine renewable company to receive the Outstanding Stewards of America's Waters Award for Operational Excellence from the National Hydropower Association in 2016. In September 2020, Stuart Davies provided public testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources Full Committee Hearing on Offshore Energy Technologies. ORPC was honored as Innovator of the Year by the Maine International Trade Center in May 2021.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm and U.S. Senator Angus King visited ORPC headquarters in September 2021.

RivGen® Power System Development In 2014, ORPC built and operated its RivGen Power System, the Company’s first river energy project, delivering power to the remote Alaskan village of Igiugig. An updated RivGen Power System was re-installed and operated in Igiugig in 2015 to demonstrate its latest technology advancements and provided one-third of the community’s electricity needs, significantly offsetting their diesel fuel use.

In July 2019, ORPC deployed its commercial RivGen 2.0 Power System and connected it to the Igiugig community microgrid, generating 35 kW at this site.

References

External links Official website ORPC on LinkedIn

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Ocean Renewable Power Company

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Ocean Renewable Power Company claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In earth science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Ocean Renewable Power Company before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Ocean Renewable Power Company ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Ocean Renewable Power Company

In research: Ocean Renewable Power Company appears in earth science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Ocean Renewable Power Company in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Ocean Renewable Power Company is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Companies based in Maine, Renewable energy companies of the United States, Tidal power, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Ocean Renewable Power Company outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Ocean Renewable Power Company in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Ocean Renewable Power Company means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Ocean Renewable Power Company out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Ocean Renewable Power Company in simple terms?

Why does Ocean Renewable Power Company matter?

Because it connects several earth science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Ocean Renewable Power Company?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Ocean Renewable Power Company.