The UK has just invested 20 Million pounds in a tidal generation project as part of the Low Carbon Economic Area.   The area will be 1 kilometer by 2 kilometers and be available for leases by energy companies.  The project is called Wave Hub.

The tidal array will be the first major tidal installation project put into place.  What is cool about this project is developers have up to 5 year leases (possibly extendable) and can generate a max of 4-5 MW of energy.  This will, in theory, encourage various technology deployments which should give us a nice glimpse of the potential for future projects globally.

Installations will begin this year with the first project and extend forward until leases are filled.  I, for one, will be watching this project closely as I am the uncredited inventor of tidal energy when I came up with the idea for an 8th grade science project.

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Plastic pollution is poisoning the world’s seas and leaving a trail of death throughout the oceanic wilderness. It serves as a largely unseen testament to the awful cost of fossil fuel dependency, which has seeped into nearly every aspect of daily life. In 2005, on an atoll deep in the Pacific Ocean, a researcher found a small fragment of plastic from a WWII era plane inside the stomach of a dead Albatross. For decades the fragment bobbed in ocean currents and tumbled about on desolate beaches. Eventually a bird mistook it for food. At this moment millions of tons of trash spoil the world’s oceans. The accumulation between California and Hawaii alone is so immense it’s been given a name: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s purportedly the single largest dump on the planet. And it continues to grow.

Beginning about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California, encircled by several major oceanic currents, the water swirls in a massive slow-moving eddy called the North Pacific subtropical gyre. A natural phenomenon turn pollution trap where debris circulates for decades and covers hundreds of thousands of square miles. Litter blown offshore and carried in river run off is drawn here by the surrounding currents. And much of it is plastic. It’s forever.

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“It is estimated that harnessing just 2 one-thousandths of the oceans’ untapped energy could provide power equal to current worldwide demand.”
-Annette von Jouanne founder of the Wave Energy program at Oregon State University (OSU)

With 70 percent of the world’s surface covered by ocean a remarkable opportunity exists to produce clean energy. The sea remains the greatest pool of untapped renewable power on the planet. The wave energy off American coasts alone can provide as much electricity as the nation’s hydroelectric plants.

“Full scale of the wave resource is about the same as the hydro resource, which is approximately six percent,” Dr. Ted Brekken told me by phone. He is the co-director of the Wallace Energy Systems and Renewables Facility at Oregon State University, “the highest-power university energy systems lab in the U.S.”

“The resource will be fully developed when there are five to seven wave parks with each of those generating over 100 megawatts,” he said. The amount of electricity from one park could power several hundred thousand homes.

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By D.E. Putnam

“If in any country a forest was destroyed I do not believe nearly so many species of animals would perish as would here from the destruction of the kelp.”
–Charles Darwin 1834

One can only imagine the abundance of creatures Darwin saw at the Galapagos Islands to suggest kelp beds were home to far more animals than the forest of any country in the world. The naturalist captures in one sentence the essential role kelp plays in the marine environment. In California, the undersea forests formed by giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) provide critical habitat and food for over 800 species of organisms. They hold one of the greatest concentrations of biodiversity in all the world’s oceans. The remarkable number of creatures whose existence depends on the giant brown algae makes it an irreplaceable feature of the marine ecosystem.

Kelp forests support one quarter of native marine life in California waters. If the kelp is lost so too are those species. Raising the specter of such a loss is the drastic decline of giant kelp along the Golden State’s shores. Over the last century eighty percent of it has vanished. The potential consequences of this wide spread loss of essential habitat are devastating and have spurred restoration efforts to reestablish the kelp.

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