Livewire: Energy generation from surface waves for long-term ocean monitoring

Scaling marine renewable energy production requires the installation of major infrastructure in the marine environment. Measuring and mitigating the impact of that development is a key challenge ľ and significant expense ľ for sustainable offshore energy. Here we propose to leverage environmental energy from ocean surface waves to enable long-duration monitoring of key variables of the ocean interior for the offshore renewable energy sector. Our development of the ôLivewireö nano-wave energy converter for the Del Mar Oceanographic, LLC (DMO) WirewalkerTM ocean-wave-powered profiler promises to remove present limitations on deployment duration, data acquisition bandwidth, and sensor payloads. By providing more data with longer servicing intervals, this system will provide significant cost savings relative to traditional monitoring techniques, meaning that it has excellent potential for commercialization. Livewire-enabled WirewalkerTM systems can provide the subsurface data required to plan, install, monitor, and mitigate impacts for offshore infrastructure. A prototype Livewire generator was developed by our team at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. DMO is a U.C. San Diego technology transfer company that holds the exclusive license to develop the Livewire technology. DMO was co-founded in 2015 by four Scripps Oceanography personnel with decades of experience in ocean technology development and at-sea data collection. This Phase I STTR proposal is intended to begin the transition of the Livewire from a functional but one-of-a-kind prototype in an academic laboratory to a commercially viable product. We believe there to be a major untapped market in the renewable energy sector for the long-duration ocean monitoring