新能源领域探索之:夏威夷

On the docks along Oregon coast, not everyone shares Pellegrino's enthusiasm. Nick Furman heads Oregon's Dungeness Crab Commission. At roughly $80 million, it's the state's most valuable fishing industry. Firman also represents a collective fisherman. He's working with elected leaders and the wave energy developers to come up with a way for both industries to coexist.

"We've kind of accepted the fact that even though it is prime habitat for Dungeness crab, even though it is an important and significant area, we're gonna have to put those ten buoys in the water. Our biggest fear is that if it were to be successful, instead of seeing fishing boats operating, you know, up on the coast, all we saw is buoys bobbing up and down. I think that's gonna be the challenge."

"The local communities are gonna have a lot of power to stop these projects."

Dr. Robert Paasch runs the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center.

"Wave energy right now we are estimating is around fifty cents a kilowatt an hour. But what we expect to see is occur, much like we saw on wind thirty years ago wind energy cost about 50 cents a kilowatt an hour. And it's now down in the 7 to 5 cents a kilowatt an hour which was competitive with a lot of carbon-based resources."

At Oregon State University's Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory, another wave energy company, Columbia Power Technologies, is testing a one-fifteenth scale model of their wave buoy. Ken Rhinefrank believes CPT's design will be a game changer.

"It'll look awesome. It'll be 60 feet in diameter, 75 feet tall, and weigh over a thousand tons. The profile at the service is very low and you actually won't see it on the offshore."

For Dr. Paasch, helping developers make advancements in wave energy. It's a chance to atone for a mistake he believes the United States made when it turned away from wind energy.

"The US led the world in wind energy in the 1970s. And then for political reasons, the federal government sort of withdrew support from that industry. In Europe, there were some countries that didn't let up. And I think the Danish are a good example of that. The Danish companies have a huge part of the market share in turns of wind energy machine across the world."