National security and defense depend on the ability to sustain maritime domain awareness across vast ocean territories, communicate warnings in real time, and insert a physical deterrence when necessary.
With those parameters in mind, consider the problem faced by the U.S. Navy in the Pacific Ocean. The Navy, the world’s most powerful seafaring force, can deploy about 200 ships in the Pacific, with a mission to cover 64 million square miles.
The math doesn’t add up. It’s an impossible task to achieve the necessary scale through the legacy approach.
Defense leaders in the United States know this, and they have concluded that the only feasible way to monitor what is going on in vast expanses like the Pacific and maintain the ability to protect U.S. interests and the interests of U.S. allies is through robotic systems, such as unmanned underwater vehicles and surface vessels. “It is clear that unmanned systems are a fundamental part of the future warfighting environment,” U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told the Senate Armed Services Committee in January. “Therefore, we must expeditiously move to integrate unmanned systems in our surface and undersea fleets.”
However, delivering energy for robotic systems to carry out long-duration missions is hard. Batteries have to be recharged. Using legacy methods, robotic systems would either need to return to shore or be collected by ships to recharge, severely limiting their range and operational persistence. “At the heart of every platform, every system, every warfighting capability we deploy lies a fundamental truth: None of it works without power,” said former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti.
Also, to be useful, data from robotic systems needs to be pushed to the cloud so that it is actionable in real-time or on a near-real-time basis. Many subsea systems have no way to communicate with command centers, meaning Navy leaders learn nothing from the data until it is manually collected. There’s a lack of real-time intelligence.
Delivering power and real-time data communications at the edge of operations is a hard but necessary challenge to overcome. It is also the problem C-Power solves to enable resident and autonomous at-sea robotic systems. Our autonomous offshore power systems (AOPS) are like an EV charging station and cell phone tower in the middle of the ocean for subsea robotics such as wave-powered unmanned underwater vehicles.
The Navy’s stated goal is for at-sea robotic systems to have the ability to persist on site without human intervention and to communicate data in real time. Getting Naval operations to that point from where they are today, stuck in a legacy environment dependent on ships and crews, will be a challenge. However, C-Power systems provide an important piece of puzzle that has been missing to date. They provide mainstream support for wave-powered unmanned underwater vehicles and other data gathering systems by harnessing a virtually limitless supply of energy from the world’s biggest and best battery, located where the energy is needed and superior to any other form of renewable or fossil-based energy supply.
Decentralizing the energy supply isn’t just a more efficient way to achieve the Navy’s robotic systems plans. It’s the only way to scale them to the level required to meet U.S. defense and security goals.
C-Power systems can help the Navy push intelligence to the edge. They can also support another of the Navy’s key goals: Removing ships and sailors from dull, dirty, dangerous jobs. The systems also lower costs by taking expensive infrastructure out of the robotic systems operational mix.
C-Power’s SeaRAY AOPS is commercializing today.
Our Oregon-class system is designed for applications such as helping the Navy charge subsea robotics while at sea, and we are developing a global customer base on the defense side around subsea robotics.
Through these efforts, C-Power is at the vanguard of overcoming the defense industry’s challenge to deliver power at the edge on a cost-effective basis.