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.
