Fourth District Supervisor Kendall Smith said visiting Chevron officials were interested to hear about Mendocino County”s activist history, from The Whale Wars to fierce opposition to aerial spraying of herbicides and pesticides to the recent GMO measure.
“This community has often been at the forefront of issues that impact our environment,” Smith said. “I told them to expect a lot of involvement and a diversity of opinion among local people.”
The lone public official who requested to meet with Chevron Renewables, Smith talked with Raymond Cunningham and public relations person Kim Copelin last week. The pair came from Houston to answer questions following Chevron”s July 2 filing for a preliminary Federal Energy Regulatory Commission wave energy permit off the town of Mendocino. They also met with a group of interested residents gathered by energy activist George Reinhardt.
Wave energy claims have now been laid to offshore waters from Little River to north of Fort Bragg by Pacific Gas & Electric and Chevron, although the two giants will each be searching for only a smaller area in which to work.
“I felt good ?about it,” said Smith, who is the Board of Supervisors” chairwoman. “We had a positive first meeting. They seemed open to hearing any local concerns and issues and a willingness to engage in a comprehensive public process.”
With county budgeting, a final Ukiah Valley plan and other issues devouring time at August meetings, Smith hopes the board can focus on wave energy in September.
While Mendocino County supervisors may discuss the issue soon, Humboldt County supervisors last week entered the fray, throwing support behind PG&E”s proposal there. The utility company has filed plans off Eureka that are nearly identical to the one off Fort Bragg. Humboldt County also faces another proposal filed at the same time by a different company, that claims some of the same area as the PG&E plan.
“We are surprised that the City of San Francisco would weigh in on a project so far from their sphere of influence,” states a letter from Humboldt County supervisors, co-signed by the Redwood Coast Energy Authority.
“We appreciate San Francisco”s gold rush” concern [about] smaller, unproven applications, but we do not share this concern with regard to PG&E”s projects. Clearly PG&E has the size, strength and capabilities to complete these projects in an environmentally responsible manner through a public process,” the Humboldt public agencies wrote.
Humboldt County supervisors have the energy cooperative to help them craft a response to the complex issue. Smith said Mendocino County doesn”t have extra resources to devote to the complex and fast-changing topic.
Locals who met with Chevron officials appreciated an in-depth look at the issue by Cunningham. He told how wave energy shows the most promise of the alternative energies, but is also the most difficult, technologically, to develop.
Wave energy is both denser and more predictable than sun or wind energy. He said there is roughly 2 watts of energy in a square meter of wind or solar energy and more than 30,000 watts of wave energy in that same square meter.
Cunningham said recent advances in wireless robotics and satellite technology have helped to track wave heights and solve vexing problems like how to fix or adjust devices offshore. New alloys are also emerging to resist the ocean”s brutal corrosion, and there are now three to five legitimate technologies that could place experimental devices in the water. These are buoys, standing sea columns and other experimental ideas in addition to the sea snake like Pelamis, which is available for commercial production.
Cunningham said the density and reliability of wave energy means that a much smaller wave energy facility can accomplish as much as larger solar and wind plants, which is also good for the environment.
Cunningham described a floating drydock he saw in Portugal that can be launched for maintaining the floating devices without bringing them to shore or even being visible from shore.
Coast resident Cindy Arch, who has led recent efforts against offshore oil drilling, was interested by Cunningham”s level of knowledge. He told her that he is one of about a dozen project managers in the world actively working on understanding the issue and developing actual projects. He warned there are others who only wish to engage in speculation.
Copelin, spokeswoman for Chevron Renewables, said the company heard during the visit that Mendocino Coast people want more information about the approval process. “We heard that people want us to consider using local resources to help in conducting the feasibility study,” she said.
Copelin said Chevron will hold community outreach meetings in the next couple of months.
“These meetings will give us an opportunity to talk about the permitting process, the proposed feasibility study, and, of course, to learn more from the residents of Mendocino County. We will keep you updated as the dates for these meetings are confirmed,” she said.
Mendocino County does not have the help of an energy cooperative like the Redwood Coast Energy Authority. Counties to the south also have mechanisms for dealing with energy. Reinhardt”s Energy Working Group is having difficulty getting inland supervisors to be interested in even adding an energy element to the county general plan.
Resident Toni Rizzo led an effort several years ago to start a Municipal Utility District on the coast.
“It never took off for various reasons,” Rizzo said. “One of the things I looked into was wave energy. The reason I was interested was so the community could explore ways to have local control over clean sustainable energy. Not so when corporations like Chevron and PG&E can make huge profits from it,” she said.
“I think there could be real environmental concerns with this,” Rizzo continued. “And the danger is much higher with a for-profit corporation in control, of course. I really don”t like this turn at all. I find it interesting and disturbing that a corporation can make a claim” on the ocean for this purpose, as one would for a mine. I don”t get it. When did this become possible and legal and who approved it?”
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, also known as FERC, has asserted jurisdiction over the process of filing claims for study areas that work like mining claims. Retired engineer Rob Cinq-Mars of New Hampshire maintains a Website on the subject at www.FreeFlowEnergy.com. He is the only private individual to make a public filing with FERC on the Mendocino Coast proposals, although anyone can file.
Cinq-Mars has no specific information on the Mendocino Coast projects, but he is investigating the lone FERC-granted preliminary permit in California, for Oceana Energy in San Francisco Bay. He says PG&E has put up $1.65 million to pay for the environmental study in that project.
“The industry, as I see it, is filled with charlatans and dilettantes — people who are grabbing up resources with no demonstrable expertise, capabilities, resources or history in the field. Many of the power numbers are unreliable” and it is very easy to prove wrong,” he said.
“Even the units of kilowatts, megawatts or gigawatts are meaningless in a renewable energy,” Cinq-Mars told the newspaper. “I get very upset when I hear claims in the news that a project will produce, 10 megawatts of electricity — enough to power X homes.” At slack tide (for tidal projects, not wave energy), they are providing zero kilowatts to one home. These bogus numbers get amplified by FERC (who are judges not engineers), they get published in the media and waved by politicians eager to look green. This is not good science and ultimately will not benefit the industry.”
Rob Cozens, of Mendonoma Marine Life Conservancy, was one of those who met with Chevron officials. The organization led by Cozens has also been involved in marine issues and has been studying wave energy.
Mendonoma Marine Life Conservancy is a private, three-year-old group of 16 educators, fishermen, environmentalists, divers, tribal Americans, kelp harvesters, and other stakeholders focused on the offshore geography, ecology, fisheries, and recreational uses of California, Cozens said.
Monthly digests of this discussion are available to the public at http://lists.topica.com/lists
/mmlcwave/read, Cozens wrote.
The organization has drafted a statement of support for wave energy — with lots of “ifs” attached.
Cozens thinks the secrecy Chevron was so intent on locally is “standard corporate mentality, from which PG&E may be slightly more removed because of its quasi-public utility status. I heard Chevron claim the post-FERC filing process will be transparent,” Cozens said.
He said he still isn”t a fan of the oil giant.
“But if I can help to nudge Chevron toward investing in relatively benign renewable energy and away from fossil fuels, I believe it”s a positive step,” Cozens said.
