Today, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar will hold a high-profile public hearing in San Francisco about the future of offshore oil drilling along America's coastlines.
We have a choice. Invest in safe, renewable forms of ocean energy -- including wind, wave, tidal and current power -- that will help secure our future prosperity, create thousands of new jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Alternatively, we can continue to give tax breaks to oil companies that pollute our oceans and keep us locked in a carbon age.
The stakes are high. Oil companies are lining up to cash in on a Bush Administration proposal to offer petroleum development in 1.7 billion acres of formerly protected coastlines, including 136 million acres off the coast of California. This proposal represents a huge step backward. Our country has finally woken up to the need for a green energy future. Now we need to invest in the technology to make America the world leader in renewable energy.
Offshore wind power is one promising source of energy that is commercially viable today. Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimate that the wind off America's coast could generate nearly 1,000 gigawatts -- a little more than the current U.S. electrical capacity.
Ocean power, while not as developed, is every bit as promising. California has more than 745 miles of coastline, and every mile has daily energy transfers in the form of waves, tides and current. Estimates vary, but experts suggest that more than a quarter of California's energy demand could be met by technology that harnesses these forms of ocean energy. Economic projections indicate that ocean energy could become cost-competitive over the long term if governmental leadership exists to encourage investment in these technologies.
Over 100 years ago, Adolph Sutro, the 24th mayor of San Francisco, recognized the power of San Francisco's waves, building a wave catch-basin that he hoped to one day turn into a wave-powered "overtopping" system near Cliff House.
Today in San Francisco, we're not just talking about ocean power, we are advancing its actual implementation. We have submitted an application to the federal government to develop an underwater wave project off San Francisco's Ocean Beach that could generate between 30MW and 100MW of power. And we are actively working to develop a tidal power demonstration project in the San Francisco Bay that demonstrates the promise of technologies that capture tides.
Before we move forward with ocean energy projects, there are environmental concerns that must be addressed. We need to avoid impacts on marine habitats, releases from foreign material into the water (such as hydraulic fluids), and visual and noise impacts to coastal residents.
Federal leadership on ocean energy is crucial because virtually every site where ocean power is likely to be tested or deployed is subject to federal jurisdiction. Unlike conventional wind and solar, ocean power cannot be tested or deployed on private land. The industry will only emerge and mature in the U.S. if the federal government uses its position to advance the technology.
Federal government action should include:
1. Federal policies to facilitate ocean power demonstration projects as a first step toward commercial development of ocean power.
2. FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) and MMS (Minerals Management Service) should resolve their jurisdictional dispute and clarify their respective authorities for regulation of ocean energy. This is already underway.
3. Federal and state regulatory agencies should compile existing information on ocean power (data collected to date, etc.) into a publicly accessible common library.
4. Beginning in 2009, federal and state governments should vastly increase R&D to study, monitor and report on common impacts of ocean energy so that these issues can be efficiently addressed for each project.
5. State and federal regulatory policy should explicitly encourage pilot and demonstration-scale projects under permitting conditions, which assure protection of ocean resources.
6. Federal and state regulatory agencies should prepare a unified environmental document for each application for deployment of demonstration projects, and should otherwise coordinate their permitting procedures.
7. Decisions on individual applications should advance the public interest by increasing renewable generation capacity and effectively protecting the affected ocean resources.
Faced with a choice between a downward spiral of environmental degradation and increased reliance on a finite resource or investing in safe, renewable energy that can power our country and save our planet, the choice should be clear.
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One legal jurisdiction with reasonable laws/regulations with regard to this. If his honor the Mayor gets a bite, and the state of California, and the Feds it is going to be a mess, with contradictory regulations and lots of red tape to slow things down.
One, preferably federal regulatory body that streamlines the process for the companies and entrepreneurs that do this, so they can pay the workers that build these things more than they do the lawyers and accountants and lobbyists who deal with the red tape.
Pardon me but I cannot see any rational justification for his honor the mayor (or the state of California) having any jurisdiction whatever on a company producing wind energy more than 12 miles offshore of San Francisco.
Further regulations on the means to transport the energy from the however many mile limit to shore should be subject to one and only one jurisdiction, and that should allow competing methods of moving energy to shore.
We are in the early days of this technology, please politicians make things a bit easier for the folks that put their money and reputation at stake to actually build these things.
Prayer of a working marine engineer.
As a San Francisco resident, I want to thank you for doing a great job Mayor. You have taken on challenges (gay marriage/Civil Rights) that were very unpopular and changed history. You have guts. I look forward to Greening of our State after you get in office. Please put the money back into our UC systems. Arnold cut out CSU system was well as the Public Education totally. It is hard to get into schools not and the services have be drastically cut. Please put our education first.
Thanks so much for changing San Francisco for the better. Well, I just wished that we could get a handle on our real estate issues (affordable rents). Paying $2300 for 1 studio apartment in a safer neighborhood per month for rent is crazy.
Thank you for taking up this cause.
Wilbur
Not for nothing, I love the idea of tidal power generation, but in the extensive "qualifications" (noise and aesthetic pollution, etc...)I am not encouraged. Perfect, impact free energy sourcing seems like the enemy of good, lower impact energy.
It uses Warm Surface Water (a giant Solar Energy Sink, the Ocean is. Yeessssss!) to boil low pressure Ammonia, which then drives a Turbine - just like water turning to steam does; then uses Cold Deep Water to recondense the Ammonia so that it can be boiled again.
I just sent a proposal to Alan Burns, in Perth Australia; who invented a device called C.E.T.O. (serendipitously an anagram of O.T.E.C.!); to combine the two technologies.
Look them up. The CETO system would pump up cold water to cool the OTEC Evaporator Coils; which is, supposedly, the only reason OTEC has only been set up in Hawaii - as all of the other ways that they've tried to bring up enough Cool Deep Water have failed.
There are Countries - including Bangladesh and India - who are working on Gigawatt scale Power Plants based on OTEC right now!
Will ConEdison and PGE (or whoever sells you your juice) go the way of GM, Ford, etc. - all for the sake of the Maintaining the coal-fired Status Quo?