Efforts to Harvest Ocean’s Energy Open New Debate Front
NEWPORT, Ore. - Chris Martinson and his fellow fishermen catch crab and shrimp in the same big swell that one day could generate an important part of the Northwest’s energy supply. Wave farms, harvested with high-tech buoys that are being tested here on the Oregon coast, would strain clean, renewable power from the surging sea.
They might make a mess of navigational charts, too.
“I don’t want it in my fishing grounds,” said Mr. Martinson, 40, who docks his 74-foot boat, Libra, here at Yaquina Bay, about 90 miles southwest of Portland. “I don’t want to be worried about driving around someone else’s million-dollar buoy.”
The coastal Northwest is one of the few parts of the West where water is abundant, but people are still fighting over it. Amid concerns about climate change and the pollution caused by generating electricity with coal and natural gas, Oregon is looking to draw power from the waves that pound its coast with forbidding efficiency.
It might seem a perfect solution in a region that has long been ahead of the national curve on alternative energy. Yet the debate over the potential damage - whether to the environment, the fishing industry or the stunning views of the Pacific - has become intense before the first megawatt has been transmitted to shore.
“Everyone wants that silver bullet,” said Fran Recht of the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission. “The question is, Is this as benign as everyone wants to say it is?”
The first federal permit to conduct testing for a wave energy farm off the coast of the United States was awarded in February to a company that wants to study the ocean area near Reedsport, Ore., 60 miles south of here. Three more permits have since been approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Major technical and financial obstacles remain, and energy generated from waves is not expected to start contributing to the electrical grid in the United States for several years. Yet like wind energy in its early stages in the 1980s, wave energy is considered promising, perhaps inevitable, with the potential to one day provide 5 percent to 10 percent of the nation’s energy supply, according to some projections.
Oregon, Washington and Northern California, where the Pacific Ocean first meets land in the contiguous United States after gathering momentum for thousands of miles beneath westerly winds, have the potential to generate four times as much energy from waves as states on the East Coast, according to studies by the Electric Power Research Institute.
All of the permits approved have been in Oregon, where transmission lines run close to the coast, making them easier to tap into, and where state government encourages businesses to explore new forms of energy.
With state support, Oregon State University is testing a wave energy buoy it plans to deploy off the coast here next spring.
Finavera Renewables, a Canadian company with an office in Portland, has conducted tests near the Yaquina Head lighthouse here, and has a permit to do more testing near Coos Bay. Ocean Power Technologies, the company planning the project near Reedsport, has received a preliminary permit to test the potential for a wave farm it says could generate up to 50 megawatts of electricity. A typical coal-burning plant produces about 600 megawatts.
Several kinds of technology are being tested. Some would use buoys that hold turbines turned by waves. One type being tested at Oregon State would create energy from the relative movement between a fixed spar and a buoy that rises and falls with waves.
The Reedsport project could transmit energy to shore through an outflow pipe once used by a now-defunct timber mill. That convergence of old economy and new reflects what supporters of wave energy say is fitting symmetry for a region that has evolved from an extraction-based economy built on logging to one striving to use natural resources in ways that are environmentally sound.
But some environmentalists and fishermen worry that the recent rush for renewable energy is more about politics, big business and the next big thing than it is about clean energy. They warn that too little is known about what effect wave farms might have on migrating fish and whales.
“The tendency with new technology is always to minimize the downside,” said Ms. Recht, of the fisheries commission, which works with conservation agencies and the fishing industry to protect fish populations. “I’m not prepared to take new risks unless we’re conserving and respecting the energy we already have.”
Nancy Fitzpatrick, the administrator of the Oregon Salmon Commission, which is financed by the fishing industry, said: “Is it going to impact us? Going way back to the dams, we find out later that of course, yes, it affected salmon and migration. So we don’t want to be stuck in a situation like that with wave energy.”
For now, wave parks are expected to be built two or three miles offshore and cover as much as several square miles. Supporters say they will barely be visible, it at all.
Philip D. Moeller, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and a supporter of wave and tidal energy projects, said the government was “not allowing these to go into sensitive areas.” Mr. Moeller added, “We haven’t defined sensitive area, but the point is we’ll be cognizant of that.”
He said the commission was encouraging wave energy companies to seek a new five-year “pilot license” the commission has created specifically for wave and tidal energy projects. The license, which could be gained in six months, would let companies set up a short-term wave farm to test technology and demonstrate success to wary investors. If environmental damage became evident, he said, the equipment could be removed from the ocean fairly quickly, something that is far more complicated with dams.
“Let’s get this stuff in the water and find out what it has to offer,” Mr. Moeller said. “Consumers want green power, and this is an option.”
Erik Olsen contributed reporting.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
“The tendency with new technology is always to minimize the downside,”
**so true-although i dont think we should abandon it unless it is bad for fish, not fisheries. Too much human focus on things is what got us into the trouble with pollution in the first place.
With clean energy solutions and a subsequent major reduction of serious pollution of our atmosphere and ocean waters, the fisherman who is complaining would eventually have far more profitable catches.
Some would complain if they were given a gold watch and it was made in America.
Well, maybe a poor anology there, ‘made in America’ isn’t very likely come to think of it.
Arguably like oil rigs, by having small no boating zones, wave energy farms could become small safe sanctuaries for marine life. Shortsighted fishermen’s protests probably stem more from their exclusion from fishing in these places than from hazards to navigation, not realizing or caring that sanctuaries would produce more fish.
Indeed that’s true Ezeflyer. The area of the oceans reserved, would be comparible to a dime on the playing field in the Super Dome, or probably even less than that analogy.
They should be talking to marine biologists and energy experts, not fisherman. Since no one is willing to say at this point exactly how energy harvest is going to affect oceanlife, it doesn’t benefit anyone to speculate. Information: collect, study, interpolate.
I dare say that the bobbing bouys will have far less effect on the ocean life than oil spills and plastic floating in the water and deadly atomic particles of dust floting on its surface. or a horribly polluted atmosphere and global warming, primarily caused from burning coal.
I agree with ezeflyer. Check out some close-ups on Google Earth. Most ports, harbors and coastal marinas are protected by jetty or a barrier island. Such an energy wave system could be placed on the unprotected sides of the barrier. Also on bouys marking shipping channels and navigation hazards.
An extra tax of one dollar on a barrel of oil, foreign or domestic, would be a good subsidy (bribe) to a private enterprise.
They could put hundreds on the waterways where the ferrys operate between New Jersey and Delaware for just one example. No commercial fishing there and plenty of tide and wave action.
I agree with the above comments. There are lots of sites that could be used and having no fishing zones increases the number of fish caught in the fishable areas. It is a win-win.
All of the permits approved have been in Oregon, where transmission lines run close to the coast, making them easier to tap into, and where state government encourages businesses to explore new forms of energy.
One of the key costs of harvesting wave power is the connecting cable. Five to fifteen percent of the energy produced in central plants is lost to the resistance in the electric grid. The grid has huge up front material costs that are hidden from the citizen at decision making time. The grid is also a terrible blight on the landscape. Wave energy presents less of an aesthetic problem, but the material/environmental costs are right up there.
Compromise, for the sake of the economic growth rate (to help the capitalist system appear to work well), was the past approach that left us with energy waste, gluttony and addiction, expensive, destructive energy infrastructure, climate catastrophe, endless imperial energy wars, and societal breakdown.
In evaluating new forms of energy harvest and expansion of energy infrastructure, there is really no room for compromise this time. And we can’t use global warming as an excuse to ram things like this through. Global warming is the result of the US-style laissez-faire capitalist spewing greenhouse gases in all of his myriad wasteful, inefficient and largely unnecessary enterprises. We have to stop the capitalist godzilla in its tracks, not try to fuel it in a cleaner way. Tidal/wave power is still a centrally planned/controlled approach. We have to get away from that, and distribute the economic/political power to the people through distributed energy production. We’re dismantling the rural electrification program and all the rest of the capitalist schemes to control the society.
A crucial point is that Oregon is encouraging businesses to explore new forms of energy. We have to embrace a new value system which makes such public policy mandatory. We have to embrace the idea that the only legitimate public policy is policy in the public interest. The citizen has a civic obligation to do so as formidable as it seems.
The citizen will argue that there aren’t enough hours in the day to make any serious progress in the civic realm. Currently, markets are very tightly controlled, to ensure that the wealth is redistributed from the people and to the capitalist. But there ARE enough hours in the day after we break the capitalist’s strangelhold on markets. We can satisfy our material needs on 15 hour work weeks, leaving plenty of time for civic training and work.
So basically, we have to outlaw most of the capitalist ideology like the Germans outlawed Nazism. We end up with a very enlightened population, that spends the time and effort working out problems such as how best to channel energy, and what is a reasonable level of consumption. Technical questions are answered optimally in a systematic process. We keep the work weeks down to 15 hours, and when the capitalist tries again to rise up, like a weed, we whack him back down to size.
yup good old fisherman, complaining ’bout fishin’, ah huh, ain’t gonna be no fish anyway if they keep fishin’ ‘em out like pigs at a tough, not to mention the world fisheries have been steadily declining, to the point of fishing immature stock, that haven’t breed yet, not to mention the pirate fishing that takes place in third world bays around the world with roller nets destroying the habitat for one big (and last) catch… yup time is diffently limited for many of the the humans on this planet, the die off has been happedning to the tune of millions…dying from lack of simple neccesities, ie food (political) and clean water, (ignorance) and using 90% of the worlds catch for fertilizer for unsustainable farming techniques.yup good thinking Mein fuhrur, where is thy leaders? oh hopeless people!