California Coast & Ocean

California's Waves
Other than environmental concerns, one of the biggest worries shared by communities in both Oregon and California is that broad exclusionary zones might be set up around the facilities, shutting out other users.

Off Fort Bragg, PG&E received a preliminary FERC permit to study an area of "68 square miles right in front of the harbor, which is almost 100 percent of the fishing grounds," said Jim Martin, West Coast regional director of the Recreational Fishing Alliance and a member of Fishermen Interested in Safe Hydrokinetics (FISH) Committee, a Mendocino County-based alliance of recreational and commercial fishing associations.

Another PG&E study site, off Eureka and the Samoa Peninsula in Humboldt County, is 136 square miles, "right in the middle of prime crabbing grounds," said Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations.

The fishermen aren't worried that they'll be shut out of the entire area awarded in the permits--the wave farms would be much smaller--but they are concerned that PG&E has not provided more specifics about where they believe the facilities would be sited within these areas. Other projects that have received permits along the coast have asked for much smaller study areas and provided more specifics about the projects, including their expected size.

Bill Toman, PG&E's project manager for the North Coast wave projects, responded that the company has not pinpointed any sites yet. "We wanted to study a large area systematically to find the one place to put the demonstration project," he said. "We've got a football field that we're going to try to find a place to put the football on. We'll be looking at small areas one at a time."

Before a company can begin building a wave facility, it must apply to FERC for a license and also obtain permits from other federal and state agencies, including the Fish and Wildlife Service and, in California, the State Lands Commission and Coastal Commission. Coastal communities and fishing groups will have a chance to provide input as part of these processes, but many believe that will be too late. "This is the time for people to get involved, before there's a proposal on the table," said Martin. "Once you have a proposal, it's usually already a done deal."

PG&E will not make decisions about specific sites or technologies until it has collected data and met with federal and state agencies as well as local groups and governments, Toman said. "We want to understand all of the stakeholders' issues and concerns, so we can put together a testing program that everyone is comfortable with." Input from the fishermen will be key, he said. "We would view them as one of the most valuable knowledge assets we could incorporate in the process."

Eureka crab fisherman Dave Bitts, for one, remains skeptical. "Let's face it, we're a flea. The fishery is important to us [fishermen]--it's what we do--and to the community, but compared to carbon-free energy? That's a gorilla."

PG&E, like all private California utilities, is under a State mandate to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010, and hopes that each of its study sites might provide up to 40 megawatts when fully built out. If test results are promising, PG&E would contract with a technology company to first build a demonstration project of no more than five megawatts, then, if it is successful, expand to a commercial facility within the next seven to ten years.

"Hopefully by the time we want to build the commercial project, the federal government will have [the jurisdictional dispute] resolved," Toman said.