History
The quest to find a way to harvest wave energy was active in California in the early 1900s. All of the efforts began close to the shore, each with their own unique design who saw some minor success in Santa Cruz, California.
It was discovered in the 1970s that more wave energy is located in deeper water. Most all the wave energy efforts moved offshore. Only a handful of efforts and including Highwave are investigating systems to harvest energy inshore .
Large devices were built starting in the 2000’s and mostly in Europe with offshore grid connection ports for devices several km offshore to capture this higher grade of wave energy. But despite huge efforts, expectations and investments, no one has found an economical way to harvest this blue green energy. For now, only the surfers have figured out the way to efficiently harvest wave energy.
Our efforts began in a test tank at Scripps Institute in San Diego in the late 1980s. A model was made and it created a perfect wave with a discovery of the “Y” reef.The idea and challenge from Yvon Chouinard was to create a structurally inert design that would be compatible for all marine life including surfers. The late James (Kimo) Walker from the University of Hawaii’s PhD thesis on creation of an artificial surf reef became the classic reference guide at that time.
The offshore section of Kimo’s “V” shape reef design was expanded to a “Y” shape reef from our Scripps discovery. The tripod shape football field size reef has the single leg pointing offshore to focus and amplify the wave energy. The wave feels the ”V” form for a wave peeling to the right and to the left and also defining the basic protection zone on the shore. Every reef would be designed to the offshore and inshore bathymetry including basic slope, wave exposure, and wave history.
Our Story
We founded the historic Stanley's Reef Foundation that was named from a diner that shared a dirt parking lot that had a surfing wave also called Stanley’s. The perfect reef and the diner were both crushed by a freeway off ramp in the 1970s. The federal non-profit that was started in California from Ernie Montana's Hawaii State foundation “Quantum Reef” who’s efforts started when a volcano took out a dozen of the finest surfing locations on the Big Island of Hawaii in the 1980s.
Quantum reef had the goal to bring back the waves for kids of the big island who needed the waves for a healthy Hawaii lifestyle. Many amazing people assisted Stanley's Reef Foundation when the Oil Piers in Ventura County, California were scheduled to be removed and just a few miles down the road from the ghost of Stanley’s. The hired experts said the waves and the large popular beach would not be affected with the pier removal and so no mitigation was considered as unnecessary to allow any effort to replace the beach and or the surfing waves lost.
Stanley’s Reef Foundation did not agree with these experts and made it public and unfortunately… we were right. But this did set the stage in the early nineties to help secure a federal act of congress for the hope to assist us to get funding for construction and permits for a restoration. With the help of community and funds from the Betty Elders C Street contest. The foundation survived and no one got paid for the goal
to use every dime to bring back the wave and the beach at Oil Piers.
Stanley's Reef brought in an act of congress with the work of the late and great Shelly Merek for the opportunity to consider private technology that could find a solution for the global problem of shore erosion and loss of sandy beaches.
Highwave’s reef design was engineered for this project by Oceaneering, a now famous global ocean engineering firm founded in Santa Barbara, California. Experts from academia such as Professor Emeritus Steve Mclean from UCSB and the US Navy with legendary anchoring experts and NAFAC engineers such as Bob Taylor and Paul Paulo got involved to develop a specific design to help us bring back the beach and the waves.
The federal contract to restore Oil Piers was given to a New Zealand company that went bankrupt and the federal funds of 3.5 million was appropriated but never allocated.
A dozen projects in USA were chosen & formalized and funded except for the one that may have held the key. Highwave continues to upgrade the technology & with efforts into the development of a wave energy component because if you can focus the wave energy why not try to capture some of it.
Stanley's Reef Foundation was closed and all the remaining funds for a project at the Oil Piers project were donated to the Save the Waves Coalition.
