Kate Wing's Blog: Moving Beyond Oil

The wave energy of the future, Part I

2007-12-21T22:06:07Z

The Energy Bill touches all of us, even the fish, as wave and tidal power struggle to move from experiment to reliable source. The bill authorizes funding for R&D, including the creation of national demonstration centers. Whether or not that funding comes through is another story and the renewable power industry did not get the tax breaks it was looking for. All of which means money will be tight for these expensive pilot projects, which have yet to produce a commercially viable system.

Part of that is that it's early days and there are many folks running around with ideas for turning wave energy into electricity. The farthest along on the west coast is Finavera Energy, whose Aqua BuOY recently sank at the end of its test run near Reedsport, OR [1]. In New York, Verdant Energy called it quits after blades kept snapping off its turbines in the East River. The ocean is a harsh environment -- corrosion from salt water, tiny animals fouling your moving parts, and the strong tidal currents and waves you're trying to harness all place enormous stress on a hydrokinetic device. No one's built the mousetrap yet, but people are beating a path to the ocean all the same, just in case.

Which puts us in the world of uncertainty we're in today. No one can definitively say what these things in the sea will look like; they could be big snakes, or overtopping wave dragons, or a field of buoys, or something else altogether. Without knowing the details of the technology it's difficult to narrow down the potential impacts. I participated in a meeting in October to outline the ecological effects of wave energy where we had a lot of conversations like this:

"How many cables will you need to connect it to the seafloor?"
"Could be three per device, or maybe five, plus the transmission line."
"Okay, how thick will they be and how far apart from each other?"
"We don't know."

This is understandable from an experimentation standpoint, where the developers want to try different ideas until they find one that works best. From the standpoint of the engineers, we're asking Edison how big a light bulb will be before it's invented. From the standpoint of a grey whale, those details matter very much and it would be nice to know what to expect before anything goes in the water. Add FERC to this soup of uncertainty over what will be put where and you have a recipe for unease, panic, and, some would say, outright disaster.

FERC recently closed its comment period for a new fast-track permit approval process for hydrokinetic energy and many state and federal agencies were not pleased [2]. But California has committed to green power and that power will need to come from somewhere. PG&E is betting on the ocean, and even fishermen who fear losing key fishing grounds to power plants appreciate the real dangers of ocean acidification and rising sea levels. Can we all agree on what it means to get clean power from the sea? If not, we're taking the risk of poorly designed and monitoring projects, or relying on dirty power elsewhere. I'll explore more of the pros and cons in Part II.

[1] You can catch Finavera's inspirational Aqua Buoy video on YouTube.

[2] If you want to see the letters themselves, you'll need to search the FERC dockets for Docket PL08-1 and Docket AD07-14

Thanks to Nathanael for gently pestering me to write about this part of my work.

A year of falling chips

2007-11-20T16:21:48Z

Yesterday, the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation met for the second hearing on the oil spill we've had here in the last week. The state Legislature held its hearing last Thursday, where we heard from the ILWU that some employees of the contractor charged with spill response felt that company was understaffed, though they were not able to speak publicly without fearing for their jobs. Meanwhile the private contractor said he was just doing what he was told by the state, and the state should raise its standards if it wanted a better response. And we all learned alot about OSPR and its large binders of emergency response plans.

But there's a big difference between Sacramento and Washington, D.C., and it's not just the bomb-sniffing dogs. Yesterday was drizzly out at the Presidio, where doors for the hearing opened just ten minutes before the hearing started. I chatted with a park ranger about abalone diving, and then it was a bit of a reunion with staffers I hadn't seen since my days in DC in the late 1990s. There were flags, there was the mayor of San Francisco, and there was a wall of windows framing a view of the bay under discussion.

They got right down to business: have the Homeland Security mandates stretched the Coast Guard's resources too thinly? Why would it take the National Transportation Safety Board a year to complete its investigation? And if everyone agreed this was something that could have been prevented, why wasn't it? Call it a combination of working on Coast Guard and shipping issues for years and good staffing, but the Representatives had done their homework.

At the end of the day, even the Coast Guard Vice Admiral had to agree that something went terribly wrong on the deck of the Cosco Busan. Hundreds of ships turn right from the Port of Oakland and pass under the Bay Bridge every week, in foggy weather, and only this one hit it. Congress and the state are right to be worried about the uncoordinated response, especially since it sets a bad precedent for responses to other emergencies. But when recovering 20% of a spill is considered a great success, you've got to take a better look at your containment. The best containment is no spill at all.

Photo provided by Defenders of Wildlife, Ocean Conservancy, San Francisco Baykeeper, and SkyTruth, from image taken by the Radarsat-1 satellite, operated by MDA Geospatial Services Inc.

It already is portable

2007-08-27T18:03:15Z

My office neighbor is the talented Darby Hoover, who you may know from seat 12, Row 48 at last year's Oscars where she went to make them less wasteful. Do not blame her if they were not funny or short enough, she didn't get on that committee. On Friday, I heard her muffled laughs and shouts of amazement as Chris Colin interviewed her for this piece about why tubes of Neosporin now come in tiny plastic "travel totes". Apparently, Johnson & Johnson thought thethree inch tubes weren't portable enough and moms were losing them in their oversized handbags.

Maybe Heather can comment on this, but the moms I know either carry full on first-aid kits or they're using bags with so many tiny pockets that a little red pouch isn't really going to be the deciding factor in digging out a tube of neosporin. The explosion of stuff that comes with having kids is not improved by encasing said stuff in more stuff, especially flimsy, petroleum-sucking plastic stuff, much less those vicious hard clamshell cases tough enough to have spawned their own side industry of stuff--tools to open hard plastic clamshell cases. I agree with Colin here, if we could get the clever minds of marketers at J&J to work on reducing stuff and making stuff work better, we could probably be running our computers on avocado rinds. Mmmm....avocados...