The marine environment is challenging. Weather affects at-sea operations, and abrupt changes can even be life-threatening; saltwater is corrosive, requiring that equipment be robust; and marine life is tenacious, eventually covering everything, reclaiming it for the sea. Combining these well-known hazards with new and unknown issues related to the use of open-ocean current systems for power generation—the effects of current shifts on fully submerged equipment moored in nearly a half-kilometer of water, for example—tests the limits of operational technology.

It is partly for this reason that SNMREC plans begin with limited-duration deployments. Using a permanent mooring, supported by a surface buoy designed after the NOMAD weather buoys, prototype devices will be lowered into the Florida Current from a tending vessel, tested, and recovered for shore-based engineering analyses. Only after these procedures are refined and perfected will long-term deployments of prototypes be considered.

Because the limited-duration tests will be intermittent, there is no provision being made during the initial phases of SNMREC’s testing operations to cable the power generated to shore. Rather, it will be used to power the on-board equipment, with the excess dissipated locally. This strategy simplifies both the testing operations and the overall regulatory framework in which SNMREC operates.

Please contact snmrec@fau.edu with test inquiries and for more information.