Sonoma County's electricity-from-ocean-waves project canceled
Jeremy Hay
The Press Democrat
08/07/2011
An alternative energy project off the Sonoma County coast that local officials just two years ago hailed as a way to increase renewable energy sources has come to a quiet end.
Federal regulators have canceled permits issued to the Sonoma County Water Agency to explore generation of electricity from wave power at three coastal sites.
Now just one, so-called hydro-kinetic project remains under exploration on the state's coast, according to commission documents, in San Diego County. That leaves the East Coast and Midwest in the apparent forefront of such efforts.
PG&E has suspended projects it began in Humboldt Bay and near Santa Barbara, citing high costs and permit problems.
Water Agency officials said they couldn't get the $2 million to $3 million needed to study the sites off Fort Ross and near Sea Ranch, leading the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to rescind the permits it issued in 2009.
“It wasn't a surprise. We fully expected it,” Cordel Stillman, the agency's deputy chief engineer, said of the Thursday decision. “We were not able to secure the funds to even begin that preliminary work.”
Observers who had monitored the project, excited by its potential and also cautious about possible damage to marine life, said they were disappointed.
The commission's decision was “somewhat shortsighted,” said Richard Charter, a prominent Bodega Bay environmentalist. “Wave energy off the Northern California coast appears to be an idea whose time has not yet come.”
The county's acknowledgment that it had not found any funding convinced regulators that the project was not going anywhere, a commission spokeswoman said.
