WAVE-POWER PROPOSALS ALARM LOCALS

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CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR - As of Feb. 4, [the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission] had granted 47 permits for ocean, wave, and tidal projects
and another 41 were pending. FERC had issued 40 river permits and 55
more were pending. Experts expect the process to continue to accelerate.
Developers are rushing into hydrokinetics because recent innovations in
wireless technology and robotics have improved communication between the
devices and the shore and narrowed the price gap with wind and solar
power. Although it costs an estimated 20 cents to produce a kilowatt
hour with hydrokinetics - still about three times too expensive to be
commercially viable, more research could lower the price, supporters
say. An Idaho study for the US Department of Energy has estimated that
hydrokinetics could double the output of conventional dams by using
rivers, currents, and waves at some 130,000 sites in all 50 states. . .

Most of the permits now being sought and issued are for river projects,
some of them massive and virtually unknown to local communities, On Jan.
31, for example, FERC issued a preliminary permit for a 3,100-turbine
project in the Mississippi River near Cape Girardeau, Mo. On Feb. 1, it
granted 15 similar permits for projects on the Mississippi, each
featuring more than 1,000 generators to be sunk into the muddy water.

That move provoked criticism from Janet Sternburg, policy coordinator at
the Missouri Department of Conservation. "We are very concerned with the
potential adverse environmental impacts from this technology on the
natural resources of the Mississippi River," she wrote in a letter to
FERC, noting that the applications on file would affect more than 70
miles of the river.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0304/p03s03-usgn.html

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