Kate Wing's Blog
The wave energy of the future, Part I
December 21, 2007
Posted by Kate Wing in Moving Beyond Oil , Reviving the World's Oceans , Solving Global Warming
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.
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