Anchorage Daily News

PALMER -- Next year, Ocean Renewable Power Co. wants to hang a 20-foot miniature tidal generator off a floating platform in the Knik Arm narrows to see if it will generate power.

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The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last week granted Ocean Renewable two permits to test tidal power in Cook Inlet and Resurrection Bay. But first, they need to secure money for the project: $1 million, said CEO Chris Sauer.

If the Knik Arm test project works, Sauer said Ocean would be back in 2009 with a full-scale prototype, prepared for a yearlong test. If that works, a four-generator module, roughly 60 feet tall, 60 feet wide and 10 feet deep, could be moored like a playing card, 40 feet under the surface of Cook Inlet between Fire Island and Port MacKenzie, beginning in 2012.

Sauer estimated each module could generate enough power to serve 172 homes. It's not enough to replace other power sources, he said, but it's not meant to be.

"We're part of a solution, we're not the solution," said Doug Johnson, director of projects for the Ocean Renewable Alaska office.

The company plans to test a similar project in Maine.

The work they do here would be based out of Port MacKenzie in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, Sauer said. Port director Marc Van Dongen said he welcomes another company and more traffic at the port.

"I wouldn't see it as a big money-maker, as far as wharfage and dockage is concerned, but it would be a new industry," Van Dongen said.

Van Dongen added that, from his view, the Cairn Point-Port MacKenzie area makes good sense for harvesting tidal energy. The Knik Arm offers some of the greatest high-tide and low-tide fluctuations in the world.

Peak high is 35 feet above mean; peak low is six feet below mean, a difference of 41 feet. Those highs and lows only happen once or twice a year, he said, but the average fluctuation is about 28.8 feet, he said.

"We're in the narrowest part, where the tide is the fastest," Van Dongen said.

The high and low tides aren't as important as the swift current that carries them in and out four times a day, Sauer said.

Harnessing those tides is not a new idea. In 1977, then-Gov. Wally Hickel wrote in an Anchorage Times opinion piece that "the dream of a power-producing causeway across Knik Arm has been around for at least 40 years."

The state studied a $6.5 billion Knik Arm road crossing that incorporated energy-generating turbines in 1980, after British financier Baron Edmund de Rothschild of England held meetings here to discuss the project. Rothschild died in 1997. His bank backed the Canadian Churchill Falls hydroelectric project, which has powered Newfoundland and Quebec provinces since it went online in 1971.

That project uses dikes to divert and contain the water, a traditional hydroelectric plan. Sauer's tidal project doesn't contain the water, but relies on the force of the existing current to spin a turbine with twisted blades. Energy is generated by the turning shaft, collected and transformed into utility-grade power and sent along an underwater line connecting it with a power grid.

The Electric Power Research Institute in 2006 looked at the potential for two other tidal projects in Knik Arm. A study published on the Matanuska Electric Association Web site, www.matanuska.com by the institute lists several concerns about putting tidal generators in the Cairn Point area. Among them are the narrow channel, high levels of silt and sediment in the water, earthquakes and effects on marine life. The study suggested private investors might avoid an in-stream project, which has never been done before.

"Private energy investors most probably will not select in-stream tidal technology when developing new generation because the cost, uncertainties and risk are too high at this point in time," the study states.

The Ocean Renewable module uses a "very simple, rugged design" with only one moving part, Sauer said. He believes it will stand up to the challenge. But how it will interact with marine life remains to be seen. Salmon swim up the arm each year, followed by beluga whales, now on the brink of being declared endangered. Sauer said the test run would provide more information.

"It'd be creating a little bit of a pressure barrier (in front of the turbine) and what we've observed is that the fish swim around it," Sauer said. "But if this turns out to be a severe hazard to the beluga, we won't do it."

Sauer and Johnson were in Palmer this week to meet with Matanuska Electric Association representatives before heading to a rural energy conference in Fairbanks.

Ocean Renewable is funded with investments from friends, family and former colleagues from his background in energy companies, Sauer said. It's a limited pool, he said, and most of his time is currently spent pitching the project to so-called "angel investors," venture capitalists and other potential financiers.

"We're a small startup company with very limited financial resources," Sauer said.

The investors like the project, Sauer said, but want a proven model before they invest, so he hopes to secure $1 million in public backing for this test project. The Denali Commission and Alaska Energy Authority are two sources he's met with so far.

If the test project works, he believes money to build an $8 million prototype will come more easily.

Sauer said various parts of the Ocean Renewable turbine generator unit have been tested, some with oversight from the U.S. Navy, which critiqued the design under a cooperative research and development agreement. But whether it will all work together remains a mystery.

"No absolutely definitive tests have been done," Sauer said.

That doesn't make him less hopeful.

"I'm hoping this is my swan-song. I'll do this, get it up and running and then go play a lot of golf," he said.