Riding the marine power wave with Roger Bedard - page 2 of 2

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What about injury to marine life from underwater turbines?

Animals can swim into the turbine blades, but the blades of a water turbine turn much slower than a wind turbine.

Fish and mammals aren't going to get chopped, but they might get dinged. We don't know yet. That's why Verdant Power (see Verdant deploys tidal power array in New York) has spent $2M on instrumentation. They're looking, literally, at every fish going into their turbines and coming out of them.

I talked with Trey [ed.: Verdant co-founder Trey Taylor] and asked him how it was going. He said, "we haven't seen a lot of fish." I said, "wrong answer! You spent two million dollars! If you don't see fish, put 'em there!"

Large companies have now started to express an interest in ocean power, haven't they?

Yes. GE just invested $16M into Ocean Power Delivery. Siemens just bought a company in the U.K. called Wavegen. The first oil company, Chevron, just applied for a preliminary permit to build a tidal plant in Alaska. They're looking closely at wave power, and I wouldn't be surprised if they get into the wave power business.

I'm speaking at an offshore oil conference in Houston next week. Lots of oil companies are going to be there. I hadn't gone the last two years, but I think the oil companies are now ready.

You've written about the considerable regulatory and political hurdles to wider adoption marine power in the U.S. Tell us about them.

They're the biggest reason that other parts of the world [ed.: like Scotland, Canada, Portugal and South Korea] are farther ahead.

From a political standpoint, there isn't a level playing field in this country. Some renewables receive substantial incentives from the government. Ocean energy does not. The government at this point is tilting the playing field to where it's making it very difficult for ocean energy to get started.

That said, we live in a democracy, and these politicians are people we re-elect.

One of the biggest impediments is FERC, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. It's not making it easy for small new entrants to get into trials. Among its outdated rules: companies trying ocean power projects can't sell their electricity. They have to give it away, then pay the local utility for not generating the electricity.

Projects to date have been small, and not a lot of electricity. Some of the other pilot projects are fairly big, 1-2 MW. They don't want to have to play by those rules.

Another issue: FERC gives out its permits on a first come, first served basis. When PG&E and the city of San Francisco went to apply for a tidal permit to harness the currents underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, they found out that four months earlier, FERC gave exclusive access to that tidal resource to this company called Oceana. We looked them up, and it was a lawyer from Louisiana!

You don't have to any background, any knowledge. A third grader can write the application.

Which vendors excite you most?

You can't bet against Ocean Power Delivery at this point. They're the clear leaders in wave.

On the other hand, they've got a complex design. They're really smart people there; what I hope they're doing is working on their second generation technology that's more cost effective. Pelamis is a very complex, expensive machine.