Turning to the Tide

Next year in San Francisco Bay an experiment will take place on a technology to harness ocean tides for energy. Neal Pierce writes about it:

A gigantic energy-collection device vaguely reminiscent of a Ferris wheel, with a number of fins (or "wings") to capture the power of the rapidly passing tides, will be lowered from a barge anchored in the narrows. Using maglev technology, it will produce electrical energy that can be transmitted to shore by cable.

If the San Francisco experiment works, the way could be opened to vast "farms" of underwater energy generators, operating below the ocean surface off Florida's Atlantic Coast and along such shorelines as New England and the Pacific Northwest. A major early target could be in the Gulf Stream as it flows between Florida and Bermuda, where the 6.1-mile-per-hour current is 23,000 times the magnitude of the river flow at Niagara Falls.

Though a maverick project, this isn't your average group of graduate students financed by a messianic billionaire. These are serious people:

Enter the 20-year-old Climate Institute, an early truth-teller on the perils of global warming. Several of its leaders — Dan Power, President John Topping, environmentalist and businessman William Nitze, and former steel company executive Joe Cannon — decided the institute's powerful research and advocacy weren't enough, that there was no substitute for real-world, economically feasible alternatives to fossilfuels. And that ocean tidal power, the hydraulic energy in the globe's waters, constituted a massive untapped potential.

So in 2005, they formed the for-profit Oceana Energy to do the hard work — gathering new scientific data, pushing the engineering, recruiting capital and enlisting allies — to harvest the freely flowing hydraulic energy in the globe's waters.

Though the theoretical potential for wave energy is vast, no one yet knows what this technology will yield. But as Pierce points out, with the U.S. planning to build enough new coal firing power plants to add another 10% to greenhouse gases, the stakes are enormous. It's likely that the answers to getting greenhouse gases under control will be a mix of technologies and practices. Some are known, some are unknown or untested. This is very clean energy waiting to be tapped. It's worth taking very seriously as part of the mix that may yet mean a future worth living in.