Standing on a bridge high above the rushing emerald
waters at Deception Pass, a narrow strait in Washington’s Puget
Sound, Craig Collar voices a sense of wonder.
“Just think
about the power there,” he says. With flows of up to eight knots
(or a bit more than nine miles per hour) the site has “definitely
the highest currents in the Sound.”
Could this powerful
tide someday light up homes? Collar, the senior manager of
energy-resource development for the Snohomish Public Utility
District, will spend the next several years finding out. Following
passage of a statewide ballot initiative last year, Washington’s
big utilities were required to beef up their renewable energy
sources – not including traditional hydropower. Collar believes
that underwater turbines turned by tides at Deception Pass and
elsewhere in the Sound can one day provide electricity for up to
60,000 homes. And the Snohomish utility is hardly alone in testing
the waters: Up and down the coast, utilities and private developers
worried about climate change and oil dependency are putting money
into this newest source of power – the Pacific Ocean.
Ocean power in the West is only in the preliminary stages – there
are currently no devices in the water on the West Coast – but
already environmentalists, fishermen and even divers are gearing up
for a battle. Some observers hark back to the West’s one-time
embrace of dams. “We heard very similar comments about hydro-power
decades ago – it’s cheap, clean, all those nice catchphrases. We’re
living with the results, good and bad,” says Clint Muns, director
of resource management for the Puget Sound Anglers State Board.
Local environmentalists are concerned about possible
impacts to fish as well as to scenery. Deception Pass is not only
one of the most-visited state parks in Washington, but also an
“outstanding natural area that has every salmon from the Snohomish
and Skagit (running) through it,” says Steve Erickson of the
Whidbey Island Environmental Action Network. “This is not a place
to experiment.”
Erickson’s group would like to see
extensive study and slow implementation of the new technology,
noting the mass raptor deaths caused by the large-scale
introduction of wind turbines at Altamont Pass in California in the
1980s. In the San Juan Islands, ocean machines have been jokingly
referred to as “orca blenders,” says Amy Trainer, staff attorney
with Friends of the San Juans. Her group is concerned about the
potential development of two sites in Puget Sound, citing impacts
on the fish, the views and navigation. “It’s a tricky position for
everybody,” she says, “because we obviously want alternative
energy, but it has to be done responsibly.”
The
potential of ocean energy is vast, but the technology is
mostly unproven. Water is roughly 800 times denser than air,
meaning it can pack tremendous energy. With the ocean’s energy, the
U.S. could potentially generate enough power to meet 10 percent of
current national electricity demand, according to Roger Bedard of
the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit that is leading
the research in the field.
Applications for preliminary
study permits have soared. The Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission, or FERC, the lead agency overseeing the nascent
industry, received 43 filings for preliminary marine-energy permits
last year, versus 16 in the previous two years combined. More than
half are for sites in the Pacific.
Ocean power isn’t
cheap. The first projects near San Francisco’s Golden Gate could
produce power for 5 to 16 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is as much
as three times pricier than wind and four times more costly than
coal, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. But
prices should come down as the technology improves. The federal
government – which currently does not fund ocean-power research –
may also start chipping in. Rep. Jay Inslee, a Democrat from
Washington, is pushing a bill that would provide $50 million
annually for 10 years for ocean-power research, plus tax credits.
Ocean energy breaks down into two main
categories – tidal and wave. The West has both in
abundance. Tidal power, the type being considered for Deception
Pass and seven other sites around the Sound, harnesses the ocean’s
twice-daily ebbs and flows using underwater turbines, which are
similar to wind turbines. The best sites have plenty of fast-moving
water and not too much eddying (the latter could derail Deception
Pass).
Large tidal stations have been operating in France
and Canada for decades. Those stations resemble dams with sluice
gates, whereas Deception Pass and other small modern sites would
hide the turbines underwater.
The only tidal station now
operating in the United States is a small experiment in New York’s
East River, where six grid-connected underwater turbines have been
in place since April. The country’s most promising tidal sites
include San Francisco Bay (under the Golden Gate), Alaska’s Cook
Inlet, the Western Passage in Maine and Admiralty Inlet in Puget
Sound.
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Wave energy, which harnesses the up-and-down
motion of water to turn electric generators, has far more potential
than tidal. The number of good tidal sites is finite, but waves are
virtually unlimited. Here again, the West scores highly. The global
winds blow from West to East, sending powerful waves crashing
against the Western shoreline. “The same machine will collect three
times more energy on the West Coast than East,” says Bedard.
Wave devices are generally stationed a few miles
offshore, since the waves’ energy declines markedly at depths of 40
meters or less, according to George Hagerman, an ocean-energy
expert at Virginia Tech. Transmitting the energy to shore is
therefore a challenge. There are many competing types of wave
technology, from buoys to floating “sea snakes,” 120 meters long. A
big wave farm, the first in the world, is expected to open off the
coast of Portugal later this year.
Within the West,
Alaska has by far the strongest potential for both tidal and wave
power, says Bedard. But the state has relatively few consumers of
energy, and it’s difficult to transmit its power to the Lower 48 –
or even to places in Alaska.
That leaves Oregon and
Northern California as particularly promising for wave development.
Washington has great waves, but the Olympic Peninsula blocks
transmission to Seattle. (Despite this, an Irish company called
Finavera is pursuing a pilot project in Makah Bay at the tip of the
Olympic Peninsula.)
Southern California has two
obstacles: the coastline’s sudden eastward tilt, which blocks some
waves, and the Channel Islands. “To get big waves for Southern
California, you have to go out 20 miles,” says Bedard.
Both Oregon and California have plenty of electricity-hungry towns
clustered along the coast, with a good grid structure already in
place. Oregon’s substations have surplus capacity because of the
closure of energy-intensive timber plants, notes Kevin Banister of
Finavera, which is exploring a few sites in the state. Oregon also
is host to a leading wave research center at Oregon State
University.
Chevron recently filed for a permit to spend
up to $2 million exploring wave energy off California’s Fort Bragg.
Ocean Power Technologies aims to open a big wave park off the coast
of Reedsport, Ore. Eventually, the company hopes to deploy 200
“PowerBuoys,” producing at least 50 megawatts and taking up about
1.25 square miles of ocean.
Crabbers are lining up
against Ocean Power Technologies’ project, saying it would occupy
prime fishing grounds above sandy bottoms where crabs like to
burrow.
“We’re very concerned,” says Hugh Link of the
Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission, which represents over 400
permitted crabbing boats. “You put 200 of them out there and it
will take a significant amount of traditional fishing ground.”
Puget Sound’s prospective tidal sites are also popular
with divers. Riding the current is “like flying,” explains Mike
Racine of the Washington SCUBA Alliance, an experience that could
be rudely interrupted by big underwater turbines. However, he adds,
“It’s not a simple situation. Renewable energy sources are
important and merit-worthy.” He plans to lobby for new dive sites
as compensation for any lost spots.
Daryl Williams, an
environmental liaison for the Tulalip Tribes of Washington, says he
too is tracking all the projects in Puget Sound, because the tribes
fish in those areas.
The large number of
stakeholders, including tribes, fishermen and
recreational users, adds to the complexity of a regulatory process
that is still adapting to a brand-new industry. Although getting a
preliminary study permit has been easy, the process for obtaining a
full marine-energy license from FERC is “the same as building the
Hoover dam,” says Bedard. In other words, no special provisions
have been made to distinguish tiny experimental projects from
massive dams. The agency is likely to streamline the process,
however.
FERC is also trying to address concerns about
“site banking” – shell companies hogging the best sites by
attaining preliminary study permits, much as Internet squatters
snag promising domain names. Attorneys for the city of San
Francisco, in a filing this summer to FERC, went so far as to warn
of “the risk of sparking a ‘gold rush’ by ill-prepared applicants
with ill-conceived projects.”
Developers must generally
get a separate permit from the Army Corps of Engineers and also
consult with the Coast Guard. Plenty of other federal agencies give
input to FERC as well, including the National Ocean and Atmospheric
Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and each
project will receive scrutiny at the state and local levels. There
is also a lively debate about whether FERC or the Minerals
Management Service should have jurisdiction for offshore projects
in federal waters, which begin three miles offshore.
It
took Verdant Power, operator of the tidal project in New York,
almost four years to get its turbines operating, according to Trey
Taylor of Verdant. He complains that regulators wanted the
impossible: to understand the impact on fish even before Verdant
started its experiment. “The regulatory processes need to be
streamlined,” he says.
But others fear that things are
already proceeding too fast. “If the snowball starts to move, how
do we stop it?” asks Muns. “We’re not opposing this (but) we need
to be sure that what we do is good.”
The author
is a freelance writer based in Seattle,
Washington.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Testing the waters.
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