Tide is rising for underwater power plant plans

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MASS. MARKET: Tide is rising for underwater power plant plans

By Jon Chesto
The Patriot Ledger

QUINCY — The murky waters of the East River between Manhattan and Queens could become home to the country’s next new source of clean, green power.

Verdant Power is boasting that the underwater turbines it wants to install just steps away from its Roosevelt Island office would represent the first tidal power plant in the country to sell the electricity that it generates.

Verdant might be the first, but it certainly won’t be the only one. The New York company is at the crest of a wave of proposals to harness our coastline’s predictable and powerful supplies of tidal energy. These underwater turbines come in different shapes and sizes. They operate like wind turbines – except instead of relying on wind, they use the natural hydrokinetic energy of a shifting tide.

While there aren’t any projects in Massachusetts that are as far along as Verdant’s East River concept, researchers certainly have been busy hunting for the right spot to build a tidal power plant here.

The most favored site, based on its high tidal speeds, has turned out to be the Muskeget Channel between Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The town of Edgartown’s plans to develop a power plant there are about to hit an important milestone. Stephen Barrett, a consultant for the town, says his company is getting ready to file a draft application for a Muskeget tidal plant in the next few weeks with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Working on behalf of Edgartown, Barrett says it could take his firm, Harris Miller Miller & Hanson, about two years to finally get the green light to put turbines in the channel. Barrett says Edgartown eventually would sell the rights to develop the project to another private company, which in turn would sell power back to the town at below-market rates. He says the project, when complete, would include up to 14 turbines generating as much as five megawatts of power.

Meanwhile, researchers at UMass-Dartmouth are moving forward with plans to build a platform south of Nantucket that could be used to test tidal speeds as well as wind and wave power. The platform would play a key role in the university’s efforts to develop a new research zone for marine energy work off Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

John Miller, executive director of the New England Marine Renewable Energy Center at UMass-Dartmouth, says the Muskeget Channel is one of only two locations in Massachusetts waters where tides are strong enough to make a tidal energy project feasible today. He says the next generation of turbine technology could open up areas with less powerful tides, such as the waters around the Elizabeth Islands, as well some rivers.

The Cape Cod Canal is the other location that Miller cites. But he says the heavy boat traffic and relatively shallow water have prevented any serious plans from being developed for the area so far.

However, a company from Gloucester is hoping that will change. Ramya Swaminathan, chief operating officer at Free Flow Power Corp., says FERC granted her firm a preliminary permit to develop a tidal plant at the canal last month. The preliminary permit gives Free Flow the right to be the first firm to pursue a power plant license for the site during the next three years, providing the time needed to study the canal’s currents and water depths.

So far, though, Verdant is leading the race. Verdant President Trey Taylor says his company is the first in the country to file a final permit request with FERC to run a commercial tidal power plant. Taylor says he hopes FERC will grant a final approval by the fall so Verdant can start dropping turbines into the East River’s east channel by the end of the year. By the end of 2012, Taylor says, as many as 30 tidal-powered turbines could be spinning in the East River, with a collective capacity of more than one megawatt of power.

Taylor says his firm learned a great deal from six experimental turbines it left in the river from 2006 to 2008. One of the trickiest aspects in developing an underwater power plant is coming up with the right composite material for the turbines. Taylor says his company has gone through plenty of broken blades and rotors to figure out the right blend to withstand the punishing abuse that a powerful tide brings every day.

Ocean Renewable Power Co. of Portland, Maine, isn’t far behind. Christopher Sauer, the company’s CEO, says he expects his firm will file for a final permit with FERC by the end of March. He says it’s possible that his company could be connecting its tidal power plant to the grid by the end of the year.

Ocean Renewable Power plans to start with one 150-kilowatt turbine in 2011, and then add four more for an underwater array in 2012. The power plant would be built off the coast of Eastport, Maine, near a passage to the Bay of Fundy, one of the most robust sources of tidal energy in the world.

These tidal power plants would be submerged out of sight, avoiding the aesthetic issues that have vexed wind farm developers. They also provide a source of energy that can be counted on like clockwork, offering a welcome balance to the unpredictability of wind- and solar-powered plants.

But like any other attempt to harness a natural resource, tidal energy can generate potential conflicts as well.

The executives at Verdant and Ocean Renewable Power say their turbines pose no apparent danger to marine life. The fish, they say, simply figure out how to swim around the turbine blades. But the industry is still in its infancy, and more studies will be needed before these projects’ impact on underwater ecosystems can be fully understood.

Many of the would-be power plant operators will also need to find a way to coexist with fishermen, particularly those who drag the ocean floor for their catch.

But the biggest hurdle right now is the technology itself. Until turbines can be developed to harness tidal power more efficiently than the current models, it’s hard to imagine that a widespread deployment of these devices will be possible.

This makes the race to develop a commercially viable tidal power plant in the U.S. an important one to watch. The increasingly intense competition will hopefully yield answers that will benefit all the competitors. There’s an ocean out there, filled with kinetic energy. We’ve just got to figure out the right way to tap into it.