EarthTechling reports that a wave power test site has been selected off the US west coast - Oregon Wave Energy Test Site Selected.

Wave energy research is already an important part of the renewable energy efforts being made by universities in the Pacific Northwest but recent news issued by Oregon State University (OSU) indicates it could be headed to a whole new level. In the report, OSU says that the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center (NNMREC)-a collaboration between researchers at OSU and the University of Washington since 2008-has been working on securing an off-shore parcel of ocean that would facilitate needs for large scale wave energy research and testing purposes. OSU, for example, currently operates a small-scale wave power testing facility in the form of the Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory, but the needs of its project partners like Texas-based Neptune Wave Power call for testing at a larger scale. That sort of full scale field testing could begin soon now that the NNMREC has officially selected a site for what is to become the first wave energy research program and facility of its type in the US.

Funded by the state of Oregon and the U.S. Department of Energy, the site would be about one square mile in size, two miles northwest of Yaquina Head on the central Oregon coast. The facility would be located in an area where water is about 150-180 feet deep, with a sandy seafloor. According to OSU, it is exposed to unobstructed waves that have traveled thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean.

Google reports that they have made an investment in an 845 MW wind farm in Oregon, following their recent solar thermal power investment in Brightsource's Ivanpah project - Shepherding the wind.

We recently invested approximately $100 million in the Shepherds Flat Wind Farm, anticipated to be the largest wind farm in the world. Shepherds Flat is currently under construction near windy Arlington, Ore., and when completed in 2012 will produce 845 MW of energy. That’s a lot of wind—enough to power more than 235,000 homes.

This project is exciting to us not only because of its size and scale, but also because it uses advanced technology. This will be the first commercial wind farm in the U.S. to deploy, at scale, turbines that use permanent magnet generators—tech-speak for evolutionary turbine technology that will improve efficiency, reliability and grid connection capabilities. Though the technology has been installed outside the U.S., it’s an important, incremental step in lowering the cost of wind energy over the long term in the U.S.

Shepherds Flat will help Oregon continue to be one of the top wind producing states in the nation, while providing significant direct economic benefits to the state. The project will also benefit the region by helping California meet its aggressive renewable energy goals with a cost-effective and clean wind resource. The electricity produced at Shepherds Flat will be sold under long term agreements to Southern California Edison. ...

This project brings our total invested in clean energy to more than $350 million, including our most recent investments in a German solar photovoltaic plant and in the BrightSource Ivanpah solar power tower—the largest solar energy project in the world. We’re excited about helping deliver clean energy to the grid and we hope this latest investment encourages other companies to think about ways they can help accelerate the deployment of more renewable energy. We remain on the lookout for more projects that make business sense and will help all of us take advantage of clean, renewable energy.

Google’s investments in clean power are now rivaling that of stand alone clean energy investors. Monday morning, the search engine giant said it has invested $100 million in the world’s largest wind farm, the 845 MW Shepherds Flat project under construction in Oregon. With this investment, Google has put more than $350 million (a jaw-dropping amount for an Internet company) into clean power.

The investment in the Shepherds Flat project follows on a $168 million investment announced last week into a solar thermal project being built by startup BrightSource Energy in California’s Mojave Desert, as well as a planned $38.8 million investment into 169.5 MW worth of wind projects developed by NextEra Energy Resources in North Dakota, and a €3.5 million ($5 million USD) investment in a solar photovoltaic farm in Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany, which is near Berlin. In addition to its investments, Google’s subsidiary Google Energy — which can buy and sell electricity on the wholesale markets — plans to buy 114 MW of wind power from an Iowa wind farm owned by NextEra Energy resources.

Google's plowing $100 million into what will be the world's largest wind farm, Shepherds Flat, near Arlington, Oregon. It follows a $168 million investment in Brightsource's Ivanpah solar plant in the Mojave and brings the Mountain View company's total investments in green tech projects to over $350 million.

There are two fascinating things about Google's recent moves. First, this is money for deployment. It's project finance, not R&D. Other big tech companies like LG and Samsung have announced massive investments in green tech research, but Google is putting money to get real projects off the ground. Second, this money comes from Google, Inc, not Google.org under the RE < C program. Google expects to make money on the big projects. …

With project finance hard to come by since 2008's financial collapse, Google's dollars are helping to get clean tech plants built. Kachan noted that the company had a vested interest in clean electricity, given that after personnel, power is the biggest cost on its balance sheet.

EcoGeek has a post on a wave power project in Oregon - Oregon Wave Project Under Way.

A project to build the country's first wave power station off the coast of Oregon is finally moving forward. Wave power company Ocean Power Technologies just signed a contract with Oregon Iron Works to start building 10 buoys, with the first one to be deployed a year from now off the coast of Reedsport.

This project will test the capabilities of the buoys in the area before the company goes forward with a 200-buoy project nearby. Within two years all ten buoys should be deployed and generating power for PNGC Power, the utility that is purchasing all that clean energy. The system will have a capacity of about 1.5 MW and OPT expects to sell the power for about 15 cents/kWh.

TreeHugger reports the world's largest (for a while) onshore wind farm is being constructed in Oregon - World’s Largest Onshore Wind Farm (909 Megawatts) to be Built in Oregon.

The Portland Business Journal brings us the news that Oregon has given permitting approval to what will become the world’s largest onshore wind farm: the Shepherd’s Flat Wind Farm. Developed by the Sacramento, California firm Caithness Shepherds Flat LLC, the planned facility will consist of 303 wind turbines with a combined installed capacity of 909 megawatts. It will be located on private land five miles southeast of Arlington. No word on when construction is scheduled to begin or when the wind farm may come online.

While individually still a drop in the vast bucket of overall U.S. electrical demand, this development is of such a scale—the Shepherd’s Flat Wind Farm would slightly more than double Oregon’s wind capacity—that the phrase ‘world’s largest’ doesn’t seem ridiculous.

The current U.S. record holder for largest single wind farm is the 765 MW Horse Hollow wind farm, in Texas. Both of these, as well as every other wind farm in the world, are likely to be dwarfed by T. Boone Pickens’ planned 4,000 MW wind farm, scheduled to be completed by 2014.