Ocean power deserves better budget play
THE NEWS TRIBUNE
President Obama might want to have a chat with his Interior secretary, Ken Salazar.
While Salazar and his agency have lately been touting the promise of harnessing of ocean tides and waves, the rest of the Obama administration appears headed in another direction.
In the budget Obama recently sent to Congress, he seeks big increases for nearly every source of renewable energy but wave and tidal power.
The budget would deliver big boosts to research of solar, wind and geothermal power-generating technologies. But funding for studies of wave and tidal power would be cut one-fourth, from $40 million to $30 million.
The administration, rather than trying to defend its decision, wants credit for requesting far more than President Bush did.
What past administrations sought is largely beside the point; all that matters is what lawmakers ultimately decided to spend. When it comes to ocean power, Congress has been inclined to be a good deal more generous than the White House.
Lawmakers should keep it up.
Tidal and wave power represents a potentially huge source of clean energy. Some think they could someday rival hydroelectric power in helping meet the nation’s energy needs.
Tidal power is of particular interest in the Northwest, one of the few places on the planet where tidal differences are great enough to effectively generate power.
Tapping ocean tides has two potential advantages over the wind turbines popping up east of the Cascades: Tidal forces are more predictable and situated closer to population centers where the power is needed.
In recent years, Tacoma Power had flirted with installing the equivalent of undersea windmills in the Tacoma Narrows but found that the project didn’t pencil out financially. The equation is different for the faster-growing Snohomish PUD, which is working on a pilot project in Admiralty Inlet that could be up and running in 2011.
Snohomish’s experiment alone should be telling, but for ocean power to gain any real foothold in any timely way, research is needed to help perfect the technology and address potential unintended consequences.
That research is ongoing at the University of Washington, Oregon State and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Now’s not the time to back away from it.
Ocean power may lag other renewable energy sources in its development, but that should be all the more reason for the federal government to help underwrite exploration of its promise.
