The Pacific Gas and Electric Company will give the Fort Bragg City Council the first peek at its three-year wave energy plans at next Monday”s meeting.
At a Mendocino County Supervisors meeting in Fort Bragg on Tuesday, PG&E Spokesman Ian Caliendo announced the utility will offer separate presentations about WaveConnect to the council, supervisors and the general public on Monday and Tuesday of next week.
WaveConnect is dual proposals off Eureka and Fort Bragg in which the utility will test different wave energy converters with an eye to building large wave energy arrays in each location under a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, licensee at the end of three years.
PG&E is required to provide FERC with an outline of WaveConnect within 45 days of the issuance of its exclusive three-year preliminary permit on March 13. But PG&E is not required by FERC to submit those plans to any local agency.
Caliendo”s announcement came at the end of 30 minutes of vituperation for FERC by an audience enraged by the federal agency”s process, especially the recent denial of legal status in local wave energy for local governments.
“This is an out and out land grab in the oceans, sponsored by an outlaw federal administration on behalf of big oil,” commercial fisherman David Gurney told the board.
Two speakers said a federal agency secretive enough to entirely exclude a local public input process is likely to have a closeted agenda of laying the groundwork for offshore oil drilling.
Judith Vidaver, of the Friends of Ten Mile River, identified herself as a veteran of the 1980s battle against offshore oil drilling, remembering how the Minerals Management Service, or MMS, was “sent packing.”
“I think that was instructive to the federal government. That”s why FERC has hijacked the public input process this time … they know what they would get here,” Vidaver said.
MMS and FERC at odds
The MMS and FERC are actually at odds over wave energy regulation. The MMS is currently constructing the kind of public and local input process that FERC has refused to consider.
Thwarted by FERC, which advised the city and county to simply forget about the entire three-year study process, the two local governments asked if PG&E would submit its application first to the local agencies.
“We were asked and we were happy to do that” Caliendo said.
FERC has drawn criticism for more than just not allowing local governments to be involved in the local wave energy survey. Fellow federal and state environmental agencies have attacked FERC for rushing the process.
With so many taking aim at FERC, PG&E has had the opportunity to play the good guy.
The public meeting, in which PG&E will explain its initial plans for the next three years, will be Tuesday at Town Hall in Fort Bragg at 5:30 p.m. Supervisors made special accommodation so that PG&E representatives can make a presentation to the board on Tuesday morning, then hurry over the hill for the evening meeting in Fort Bragg.
The utility will then have less than two weeks to consider local input before submitting plans to FERC. In the past, PG&E representatives have appeared and been unable to answer questions from the audience and elected officials.
Rachel Binah”s advice
Rachel Binah of Little River, a member of the Democratic National Committee who has drawn national publicity recently as a “super delegate,” suggested the city and county have a higher power to appeal to.
Binah said she had recently talked to California Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, who is chair of the State Lands Commission. She said Garamendi and others are concerned about the way FERC has proceeded in state waters. The California State Lands Commission claims jurisdiction over ocean waters for three miles out.
Binah suggested that the local governments could get help from state agencies like the California Coastal Commission, State Lands and the California Department of Fish and Game.
“I believe you should continue your efforts and contact State Lands and ask them to intervene on your behalf with their attorney, who is the attorney general of California. That”s how we will get FERC”s attention,” she said.
“They are swatting at us as if were mosquitoes … and we are not. We have the power of the government available if we will use it.”
A giant map of wave energy preliminary permit areas was presented to supervisors. The map shows how the area exclusively granted to PG&E for study and the proposed GreenWave study area off Mendocino dwarf the land area of the coast.
However, the applicants seek a much smaller area for study and for energy production. The first PG&E spokesman to discuss the project described it as a “green” on which the actual study area would be a “golf ball.”
Under the permit, PG&E makes it clear that it intends to put devices into the ocean. In fact, industry insiders say WaveConnect could be the most important test of wave energy in America. PG&E”s original application called for a competition among wave energy devices in which three would be chosen for intense study.
“Bringing all the developers to one place and doing an intense, small scale test is a much better way to do this than granting permits to individual developers up and down the Pacific Coast,” said Mirko Previsic, a consultant who has been involved in numerous studies of the nascent technology in an interview earlier this year. He pointed out that one test in the ocean could be much more informative, and much less environmentally worrisome than allowing any company that files a permit to test.
FERC has employed the Bush Administration”s philosophy, allowing industry the freedom to develop public lands and resources while defying the work of environmental agencies as red tape, rather than part of the process. While European countries have provided millions in public funding to wave energy studies, neither Democrats nor Republicans have put the issue, or funding for it on the horizon in the United States.
FERC Commissioner Philip Moeller explained that the industry has had to spend the money and take the lead in the U.S. He said a plan to slow permit issuances and concentrate wave energy development in one place would have to come from the developers who filed for the permits.
The study plan is just the first step in a lengthy wave energy study. A similar study plan submitted recently by Finavera for a project off Eureka filled just three pages.
The 10 locals who spoke (except for Caliendo) all criticized FERC and called for the county and the city to continue to be involved and press for establishment of a local process.
“We are at a critical turning point. We have gotten much out of the ocean, scientists would tell us our life both depends upon and originated in the oceans,” said Gurney.
