Currents of Change

The Snohomish Public Utility District is leading the way in developing a source of tidal power: turbines that sit on the seabed and make electricity from subsurface ocean currents.

If you’ve ever watched the ocean during a storm, you know how powerful it is. Surges can swallow whole chunks of the coast, leaving disaster in their wake. Yet the real power is deep below the surface, where tidal currents are strong even on a calm day. Two leaders of a local utility are working hard to prove that those tides can be a clean, renewable source of energy for local communities.

As head of Tacoma Power, Steve Klein led efforts in 2005 to secure tidal power permits for the Tacoma Narrows. Since taking the position of CEO at the Snohomish County Public Utility District (SnoPUD), the 12th largest power utility in the country, he has continued to work toward making tidal energy in the Northwest a reality. Last winter, SnoPUD submitted a preliminary application for a pilot project in Admiralty Inlet, a channel off the western shore of Whidbey Island. After approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the district hopes to file a final permit application next month and get its license by January 2011.

In the meantime, the district isn’t sitting idle. Research partners such as the University of Washington, Beam Reach (a marine biology program based in Seattle that takes college students on 10-week research trips) and an orca whale advocacy and research group have been collecting data from sites in Puget Sound for more than a year.
“We’re some of the first to be tapping this [field] from the academic side,” says University of Washington oceanographer Jim Thomson. With limited funding, small companies are cautious about sharing discoveries, and most projects keep their methods and findings strictly private. This approach means that researchers began work with a mostly blank slate, measuring current speed and composition, biological activity and human use at various locations.

“It’s breaking a new trail, absolutely,” says Craig Collar, senior manager for Energy Resource Development at SnoPUD. The university publishes its data to the web within weeks, and is focused on developing a methodology that can be standardized and put to use by other organizations.

Tidal power is not widely embraced by energy pioneers. Bill Gates dismissed it as a secondary option in his speech at the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference in February, citing carbon capture, wind, solar photovoltaic, solar thermal and nuclear as the five best options for that “necessary miracle”: reducing carbon

Share this Article

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•