Harnessing Long Island Sound's Tides to Create Electricity

A company called Natural Currents Energy Services wants to use a 136-square-mile area of Long Island Sound, near Orient Point, for a tidal energy project, and another firm, Verdant Power, is hoping to put in similar projects near Fishers Island and Plum Gut. Verdant also has a proposal for the East River.

Both companies are seeking permits from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, according to Newsday (although I couldn’t turn anything up in a quick online check this morning).

Underwater turbines supposedly turn slowly enough so that they’re not a danger to fish, which distinguishes them from wind turbines, which whip around at speeds that can chop up birds. Newsday quotes an executive of one of the companies as saying the turbines would be 30-feet underwater and thus not a hazard to navigation. My recollection is that the currents in the area of the Race and Plum Gut are about six knots.

11:35 a.m. update ... Bryan Brown did the research for me and found the FERC docket numbers: FERC Docket # P-12738 for Verdant, Docket # P-12738 for Natural Currents. See his comment to this post for more.

The East River Tidal Power Project

Tidal power in the East River comes to the small screen, in this video (which is preceded by an annoying ad) from the Times website (via Gristmill).

Verdant Power is doing the work. The firm also wants to put a tidal energy project out at Plum Gut. You can find previous posts here and here.

Alternative Power: Go Slow, But Do It Quickly

If your goal is to produce electric power through an alternative means like wind or tides, you have to be able to get that power to consumers. On Long Island, the only way to do that is through the Long Island Power Authority, and LIPA says it’s in no particular hurry to start selling electricity generated by the several tidal power projects in the planning stages. From Newsday:

LIPA chairman Richard Kessel said last week the utility had launched a broad analysis of tidal power and its potential for the region. The study will look at potential sites for optimal placement, economic and environmental impacts, community and business reaction and the effectiveness of various turbine technologies….

“Before people start talking about building 200 of these, we want to do a demonstration project, we want to work with the communities, the counties, the fishermen, and assess the viability of the technology for Long Island," Kessel said.

Two hundred is obviously an exaggeration but it’s also obvious that tidal power’s potential is attractive to a number of companies (here’s Newsday’s summary of current proposals). In fact one of them, Verdant Power, will begin installing turbines in the East River on November 13.

It goes without saying that if tidal power and wind power can replace the use of fossil fuels, even somewhat, we should support it. Kessel wants to go slow. Fine, but go slow quickly. If you want to know more about how quickly, read Bill McKibben’s recent New York Review of Books piece, which a blog called TomDispatch got permission to publish, here.

Referring to NASA climatologist James Hanson and to James Lovelock, the scientist who came up with the Gaia theory of the Earth, McKibben writes:

Hansen is not quite as gloomy as Lovelock. Although he recently stated that the Earth is very close to the hottest it has been in a million years, he said that we still have until 2015 to reverse the flow of carbon into the atmosphere before we cross a threshold and create a "different planet." When Hansen gave this warning last December we had ten years to change course, but soon we'll have only nine years, and since nothing has happened in the intervening time to suggest that we're gearing up for an all-out effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the divergence between Hansen and Lovelock may be academic. (Somehow it's small comfort to be rooting for the guy who says you've got a decade.)

Go slow, but hurry up about it.

Electricity from the Tides

In ecology, as Barry Commoner said, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But that doesn’t mean some lunches aren’t cheaper than others.

Take energy generation, for example. The wind blows freely, but wind power projects are controversial because, critics contend, they’re ugly, they can be dangerous to birds, and they produce energy only when the wind is blowing. The tides, on the other hand, also flow freely, but you don’t see tidal energy installations because they are under water, they don’t pose much of a threat to fish because the propeller blades turn relatively slowly, and they produce energy all the time because the tide never stops.

Those are among the arguments being made by tidal power entrepreneurs. One company, Verdant Power, is getting ready to try a set of tidal turbines in the East River, near Roosevelt Island. Another wants to try a project off Martha’s Vineyard, where the Cape Wind proposal has caused much sturm und drang.

The technology is being labeled experimental. But maybe it can help avert the energy crisis in the Northeast that the Energy Outlook blog thinks is inevitable.