A soon-to-open facility located along Oregon’s central coast aims to ease the industry’s growing pains and to accelerate the development of devices that can withstand the punishment that comes with operating in the open ocean.

Sometime next year, the first tenant of Oregon State University’s PacWave South testing facility will plug a wave energy converter into a connector waiting at one of four berths occupying two square nautical miles of ocean seven miles from shore. The event will mark a significant milestone in the U.S. and global push to commercialize wave energy. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the facility “will be the nation’s first accredited, grid-connected, pre-permitted, open-water wave energy test facility.”

Last week, on a tour organized by the Pacific Ocean Energy Trust and the University Marine Energy Research Community, I visited the shoreside landing site of PacWave’s four subsea cables as well as the facility where up to 20 megawatts (MW) of wave energy will be fed to the onshore grid and engineering teams will optimize their inventions for operation at sea.

Here’s a look at the shoreside components of the new facility.