DENVER — The U.S. Department of Energy is canceling more than $7.5 billion in funding for clean-energy projects across the country, including more than $500 million earmarked for Colorado projects.
Russ Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, announced on Wednesday that funds would be canceled for 223 projects across 16 states, all of which voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election.
According to a list by House Appropriations Committee Democrats, 34 projects in Colorado are on the chopping block.
The cancellations affect places like Colorado State University, the Colorado School of Mines and the Colorado Energy Office, among others, whose grants have been marked for termination.
“Following a thorough, individualized financial review, DOE determined that these projects did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars,” the Energy Department wrote.
Denver7 political analyst Alton Dillard said the cuts send a clear political message.
“One, it is always going to be concerning that having a clean climate is somehow become politicized,” said Dillard. “But it also is sending the message that if you are in a state that supported Harris, that you’re going to pay.”
Denver7
Alton Dillard, Denver7 Political Analyst
Dillard warned of significant consequences for Colorado’s energy sector.
“In a state like Colorado that’s known for innovation and entrepreneurship, the downstream effects, I think, are going to be dire,” he explained. “So you add this back in again to the fact that we’re also in the middle of a government shutdown, and I know it’s an overused term, but we are at a major inflection point in not only clean energy, but just government in general.”
Dillard added that no one should be surprised by this move, as it delivers on exactly what the Trump administration said it was going to do.
The cancellations are likely to face legal challenges. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, recipients of those awards will have 30 days to appeal the department’s decision.
Reaction from Colorado’s lawmakers
In the wake of the cuts, Denver7 is hearing from Colorado lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, who represents Colorado’s 4th Congressional District, said the move was connected to the government shutdown and blamed Senate Democrats.
“This wouldn’t be an issue if Senate Democrats would stop their temper tantrum and vote to open our government. Their failure to act is hurting Colorado, from federal employees working here to ranchers and farmers depending on stability whose future is now uncertain. If anyone needs to answer questions about this, it’s Senate Democrats who are voting to shut our government down.”
Rep. Lauren Boebert / (R) Colorado
Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper, meanwhile, said the cuts “punish Americans who dared to vote against” the Trump administration.
“The cancellation of this funding for political vengeance is blatantly illegal. Congress approved this funding to create jobs and to generate cleaner, cheaper power. Even if for some dark reason you are against cleaner energy, these projects are well underway. To abandon them now wastes the funds already invested, and needlessly cripples dozens of honest, hard-working small businesses that believed having a legal contract with our country meant something. The White House strategy during their shutdown is to punish Americans who dared to vote against them.”
Scripps News Group and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
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As I watch the Trump White House and its orbiting debris field of oddballs and charlatans, a single long-ago movie scene keeps returning to my mind. In “Annie Hall,” waiting in line in a movie theatre, Woody Allen’s character becomes irritated by a guy behind him, an academic blowhard pontificating to his date about the culture. When he mentions the Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan, Allen erupts and then, in a delightful spectacle of comeuppance, produces McLuhan himself, who tells the man, “I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work. . . . How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.” Allen then says, to the camera, “Boy, if life were only like this.”
Every so often, it is. On Tuesday, eighty-six climate scientists delivered a four-hundred-page response to a Department of Energy report from July which had attempted to show that global warming is no big deal. That report was the scientific equivalent of a bespoke suit. Given that President Trump had declared climate change to be a “hoax,” and given that Energy Secretary Christopher Wright had previously declared it to be a “side effect of building the modern world,” it stands to reason that Wright’s department picked to conduct its report exactly five climate researchers, all notable for careers in which they’ve stood conspicuously outside the overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is a grave and immediate danger. These five duly concluded, among other things, that “CO2-induced warming might be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and excessively aggressive mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial.”
The rest of the Trumpian apparatus then swung into motion. Lee Zeldin, the former congressman and failed gubernatorial candidate from New York who somehow ended up as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and who had declared that his goal is to drive “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate-change religion,” embraced the findings, and quickly moved to use them in his effort to overturn the “endangerment finding” that the E.P.A. had previously relied on to regulate greenhouse gases.
The D.O.E report, however, had to be opened up for public comment, and so a climate scientist at Texas A. & M. University, Andrew Dessler, used the social-media platform Bluesky (which has largely replaced X for scientific conversation) to start assembling a global team of eighty-six researchers from all the relevant disciplines who, in a matter of a few weeks, subjected the report’s findings to peer review. Their “comment” is two and a half times as long as the report, and it is almost painfully hilarious to read. For instance, the five skeptics contended that “meteorological drought” was not increasing in the United States; as the researchers point out in their response, this is cherry-picked nonsense. In the first place, “meteorological drought” is only a measure of how much rain falls; the hotter temperatures associated with climate change have been increasing evaporation, which dries up more of that rain. And, in any event, the contrarians used the entire continental U.S. as the statistical basis for their finding, which makes no sense: as global warming increases evaporation in the arid West, it also increases rainfall in the moist East, producing the flooding rains that have caused so much damage in regions like the Appalachians. As the comment archly points out, “taking an average across the CONUS runs the risk of averaging out these trends.” Indeed, the authors note, with all the scientific citations, that “research has indicated that recent droughts in the WUS were more severe than droughts over the past 1000+ years: while megadroughts have occurred in the paleoclimatic record, the western US megadrought of 2000-2018 was the worst since the mid-1500 (Williams et al.2020) and from 2000-2021 was the worst since 800 (Williams et al. 2022) as defined using soil moisture anomalies. Similarly, climate change made the 2012-2014 period in CA the driest period in 1200 years (Griffin and Anchukaitis 2014; Williams et al. 2015).”
The comment has sections like this on every topic raised by the D.O.E. report; it’s a blitzkrieg of studies, observations, and data which makes clear that the authors were miles out of their depth, and further still out of the mainstream. But, of course, that doesn’t necessarily count for much in the current dispensation, where reality is becoming a Choose Your Own Adventure story. In the wake of the resignations of four officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week, some early-summer remarks from the Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., started popping up again on social media. He’d told Tucker Carlson that “trusting the experts is not a feature of science. It’s not a feature of democracy. It’s a feature of religion and it’s a feature of totalitarianism. In democracies, we have the obligation—and it’s one of the burdens of citizenship—to do our own research and make our own determinations about things.”
That’s clearly not true about vaccines—we’ve trusted the experts for a century, and it’s worked out pretty well, including during the COVID pandemic, when vaccines saved millions of lives. And it’s a clearly absurd thing to say about global warming: Are we planning to “do our own research” on, to pick a topic covered at length in Tuesday’s response by the eighty-six researchers, the “hemispheric symmetry of the planetary albedo”?
The American scientific enterprise, the source of so much wealth and national prestige, is being unravelled before our eyes—research grants are being cut off, satellites disconnected, reports cooked up to meet the needs of particular industries and ideologies. It is as sad as any of the other dismal effects of the past election. But the scientific method will not, perhaps, go quietly. With hundreds of years of patient work behind it, with some educational institutions willing to protect their scientists, and with researchers hard at work in less-benighted nations, the human desire to know and to understand will continue to produce results. Many of those findings will be contrary to the interests of the blowhards who, at least temporarily, control our nation, and so they may be suppressed for the moment. But whether or not they are heeded, in the end, the truth will out. If it’s not in the form of enlightened policy, it will be in the form of pandemics and wildfires, of untreated disease and rising sea level. Because life really is like this. ♦
The Department of Energy on Tuesday announced $2.2 billion in funding for eight projects across 18 states to strengthen the electrical grid against increasing extreme weather, advance the transition to cleaner electricity and meet a growing demand for power.
The money will help build more than 600 miles of new transmission lines and upgrade about 400 miles of existing lines so that they can carry more current.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the funding is important because extreme weather events fueled by climate change are increasing, damaging towers and bringing down wires, causing power outages.
The investments will provide more reliable, affordable electricity for 56 million homes and businesses, according to the DOE. Granholm said the funds are the single largest direct investment ever in the nation’s grid.
“They’ll help us to meet the needs of electrified homes and businesses and new manufacturing facilities and all of these growing data centers that are placing demands on the grid,” Granholm said in a press call to announce the funding.
It’s the second round of awards through a $10.5 billion DOE program called Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships. It was funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021. More projects will be announced this fall.
Among the ones in this round, more than 100 miles of transmission line in California will be upgraded so that new renewable energy can be added quickly and as a response to a growing demand for electricity. A project in New England will upgrade onshore connection points for electricity generated by wind turbines offshore, allowing 4,800 megawatts of wind energy to be added, enough to power about 2 million homes.
The Montana Department of Commerce will get $700 million. Most of that will go toward building a 415-mile, high-voltage, direct current transmission line across Montana and North Dakota. The North Plains Connector will increase the ability to move electricity from east to west and vice versa, and help protect against extreme weather and power disruptions.
The Virginia Department of Energy will get $85 million to employ clean electricity and clean backup power at two data centers, one instate and one in South Carolina. The DOE chose this project because the data centers will be responsive to the grid in a new way: They could provide needed electricity to the local grid on a hot day, from batteries, or reduce their energy use in times of high demand. This could serve as a model for other data centers to reduce their impact on a local area, since they place such high demand on the grid, according to the department.
“These investments are certainly a step in the right direction and they are the right types of investments,” said Max Luke, director of business development and regulatory affairs at VEIR, an early-stage Massachusetts company developing transmission lines capable of carrying five times the power of conventional ones. “If you look at the scale of the challenge and the quantity of grid capacity needed for deep decarbonization and net zero, it’s a drop in the bucket.”
According to Princeton University’s “Net-Zero America” research, the United States will need to expand electricity transmission by roughly 60% by 2030 and may need to triple it by 2050.
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The lab-leak theory lives! Or better put: It never dies. In response to new but unspecified intelligence, the U.S. Department of Energy has changed its assessment of COVID-19’s origins: The agency, which had previously been undecided on the matter, now rates a laboratory mishap ahead of a natural spillover event as the suspected starting point. That conclusion, first reported over the weekend by TheWall Street Journal, matches up with findings from the FBI, and also a Senate Minority report out last fall that called the pandemic, “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.”
Then again, the new assessment does not match up with findings from elsewhere in the federal government. In mid-2021, when President Biden asked the U.S. intelligence community for a 90-day review of the pandemic’s origins, the response came back divided: Four agencies, plus the National Intelligence Council, guessed that COVID started (as nearly all pandemics do) with a natural exposure to an infected animal; three agencies couldn’t decide on an answer; and one blamed a laboratory accident. DOE’s revision, revealed this week, means that a single undecided vote has flipped into the lab-leak camp. If you’re keeping count—and, really, what else can one do?—the matter still appears to be decided in favor of a zoonotic origin, by an updated score of 5 to 2. The lab-leak theory remains the outlier position.
Are we done? No, we aren’t done. None of these assessments carries much conviction: Only one, from the FBI, was made with “moderate” confidence; the rest are rated “low,” as in, hmm we’re not so sure. This lack of confidence—as compared with the overbearing certainty of the scientists and journalists who rejected the possibility of a lab leak in 2020—will now be fodder for what could be months of Congressional hearings, as House Republicans pursue evidence of a possible “cover-up.” But for all the Sturm und Drang that’s sure to come, the fundamental state of knowledge on COVID’s origins remains more or less unchanged from where it was a year ago. The story of a market origin matches up with recent history and an array of well-established facts. But the lab-leak theory also fits in certain ways, and—at least for now—it cannot be ruled out. Putting all of this another way: ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
That’s not to say that it’s a toss-up. All of the agencies agree, for instance, that SARS-CoV-2 was not devised on purpose, as a weapon. And several bits of evidence have come to light since Biden ordered his review—most notably, a careful plot of early cases from Wuhan, China, that stamps the city’s Huanan market complex as the outbreak’s epicenter. Many scientists with relevant knowledge believe that COVID started in that market—but their certainty can waver. In that sense, the consensus on COVID’s origins feels somewhat different from the one on humans’ role in global warming, though the two have been pointedlycompared. Climate experts almost all agree, and they also feel quite sure of their position.
The central ambiguity, such as it is, of COVID’s origin remains intact and perched atop a pair of improbable-seeming coincidences: One concerns the Huanan market, and the other has to do with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Chinese researchers have specialized in the study of bat coronaviruses. If COVID really started in the lab, one position holds, then it would have to be a pretty amazing coincidence that so many of the earliest infections happened to emerge in and around a venue for the sale of live, wild animals … which happens to be the exact sort of place where the first SARS-coronavirus pandemic may have started 20 years ago. But also: If COVID really started in a live-animal market, then it would have to be a similarly amazing coincidence that the market in question happened to be across the river from the laboratory of the world’s leading bat-coronavirus researcher … who happened to be running experiments that could, in theory, make coronaviruses more dangerous.
One might argue over which of these coincidences is really more surprising; indeed, that’s been the major substance of this debate since 2020, and the source of endless rancor. In theory, further studies and investigations would help resolve some of this uncertainty—but these may never end up happening. A formal inquiry into the pandemic’s origin, set up by the World Health Organization, had intended to revisit its claim from early 2021 that a laboratory source was “extremely unlikely.” Now that project has been shelved in the face of Chinese opposition, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology has long since stopped responding to requests for information from its U.S.-based research partners and the NIH, according to an inspector general’s report from the Department of Health and Human Services.
In the meantime, the smattering of facts that have been introduced into the lab-leak debates over the past two years, have been, at times, maddeningly opaque—like the unnamed, “new intelligence” that swayed the Department of Energy. (For the record, TheNew York Timesreports that each of the agencies investigating the pandemic’s origin had access to this same intelligence; only DOE changed its assessment to favor the lab-leak explanation as a result.) We’re only told that certain fresh and classified information has changed the minds of some (but only some) unnamed analysts who now believe (with limited assurance) that a laboratory origin is most likely. Well, great, I guess that settles it.
When more specific information does crop up, it tends to vary in the telling over time; or else it’s promptly pulverized by its partisan opponents. The Journal’s reporting, for instance, mentions a finding by U.S. intelligence that three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became ill in November 2019, in what could have been the initial cluster of infection. But how much is really known about those sickened scientists? The specifics vary with the source. In one telling, a researcher’s wife was sickened, too, and died from the infection. Another adds the seemingly important fact that the researchers were “connected with gain-of-function research on coronaviruses.” But the unnamed current and former U.S. officials who pass along this sort of information can’t even seem to settle on its credibility.
Or consider the reporting, published last October by ProPublica and Vanity Fair, on a flurry of Chinese Community Party communications from the fall of 2019. These were interpreted by Senate researcher Toy Reid to mean that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had undergone a major biosafety crisis that November—just when the COVID outbreak would have been emerging. Critics ridiculed the story, calling it a “train wreck” premised on a bad translation. In responseProPublica asked three more translators to verify Reid’s reading, and claimed they “all agreed that his version was a plausible way to represent the passage,” and that the wording was ambiguous.
Maybe this is just what happens when you’re trapped inside an information vacuum: Any scrap of data that happens to float by will push you off in new directions.
LISBON, PORTUGAL – JULY 22: TAP Air Portugal Airbus A321Neo, first flight using SAF – Sustainable … [+] Aviation Fuel, takes off to Ponta Delgada, Azores, on the day it was signed the partnership by TAP CEO Christine Ourmières-Widener, Galp CEO Andy Brown, and ANA CEO Thierry Ligonnière, at Humberto Delgado International Airport on July 22, 2022 in Lisbon, Portugal. TAP, Galp and ANA – Aeroportos de Portugal have entered into a strategic partnership for the development, production and supply of sustainable aviation fuels (SAF – Sustainable Aviation Fuel) on a large scale, from waste, recycled used oils and other sustainable raw materials. This partnership is in line with the European Commission’s Fit for 55 climate package, which includes the ‘RefuelEU Aviation’ legislative initiative aimed at increasing the supply and demand for SAF in the European Union and its use by 2% by 2025, 5% by 2030, and 63% by 2050. (Photo by Horacio Villalobos#Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)
Corbis via Getty Images
Does the aviation sector have its head in the clouds? Indeed, the experts are working hard to make hydrogen a sustainable aviation fuel.
Given the expansion of the production tax credits and the funds for regional hydrogen hubs, hydrogen’s stock is rising. Its possibilities lie in the hard-to-decarbonize industrials or things that cannot quickly electrify. That applies to planes, trains, ships, and long-haul trucks. Electric generators can also run on a blend of hydrogen and natural gas.
“We see the technology coming and the cost coming down. The price of natural gas is lower than today’s price of hydrogen,” says Judith Judson, head of hydrogen at the National Grid, in a webinar hosted by Our Energy Policy. “But with tax credits, the economics are moving in the right direction. Like wind and solar, the prices will come down. In meeting our net zero goals, hydrogen has a role to play. Our goal is to see green hydrogen produced from renewable energy. We plan to eliminate fossil fuels, but we want to do so affordably.”
Green hydrogen-derived sustainable aviation fuels may be a long flight, but that plane will take off within 15 to 25 years. Consider Delta Airlines: Louisiana-based DG Fuels is supplying it 385 million gallons with 75%-85% fewer lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions than conventional jet fuel.
Various forms of renewable energy make up sustainable aviation fuels. That includes food waste, animal waste, and sewage sludge, which easily mix with jet fuels. The U.S. Department of Energy says its carbon footprint can be 165% smaller than petroleum-based jet fuel. A study by Clean Sky 2 and Fuel Cells & Hydrogen 2 says that hydrogen-powered aircraft could be ready for flight as early as 2035, although 2050 may be more doable for longer flights.
Azul Airlines, British Airways, Jet Blue, KLM, Lufthansa, Scandinavian Airlines, United Airlines, Virgin Australia, and Virgin Atlantic have already used biofuels for commercial flights. As for Jet Blue, it is using sustainable aviation fuel at its hub in the Los Angeles International Airport. It works with World Energy and World Fuel Services INT to get sustainable aviation fuel.
“Our ultimate goal is to achieve climate-neutral aviation by 2050. Turning this ambition into reality requires the seamless integration of a range of important new technological advancements, one of which is hydrogen-powered aircraft,” says Axel Krein, Executive Director of Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking.
From Airport Hubs to Hydrogen Hubs
A diesel all-aluminum 4-cylinder OM 654 unit combustion engine sits on display beside a … [+] Mercedes-Benz E220 automobile during Daimler AG’s TecDay Road to the Future event in Stuttgart, Germany, on Thursday, June 9, 2016. Mercedes-Benz will start selling a fuel-cell electric version of its GLC sport utility vehicle next year, an effort to broaden the appeal of the technology with the first publicly available battery that can be charged both with hydrogen and at a wall socket. Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg
Besides the production tax credits provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that passed a year ago includes up to $7 billion to establish between 6 and 10 regional hydrogen hubs across the country. The goal is to create a network of hydrogen producers and industrial consumers with an interconnected infrastructure to accelerate the use of clean hydrogen — part of the White House’s plan to reach net-zero targets by 2050.
For example, the hubs want to optimize each region’s strength — comprised of their natural resources and their industrial base. Some regions are rich in natural gas, while others have a lot of solar and wind energy potential. At the same time, companies must stand ready to buy the resulting hydrogen. Critical to the pursuit: converting legacy infrastructure and building new pipelines.
“The regulatory environment is key,” Thomas Green, a fellow with the Energy Department’s Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technology Office, said during the program. “We need to lower barriers and ensure stakeholders are engaged while assuring the highest amount of environmental fidelity.”
Today 99% of all hydrogen is produced in reactions involving coal and natural gas, considered “grey hydrogen” that does nothing to limit CO2 emissions. The aim is to produce hydrogen from low-carbon energy sources — green hydrogen — and expand its use in the transportation and power generation sectors. In its Hydrogen Economy Outlook, Bloomberg New Energy Finance says it could supply 24% of the world’s energy demands by 2050 while cutting CO2 levels by 34%.
For that to happen, the price of green hydrogen has to fall. The Energy Department is taking an “Earthshot,” launched in June 2021. It seeks to reduce the cost of clean hydrogen by 80% to $1 per 1 kilogram in 1 decade.Currently, hydrogen from renewable energy costs about $5 per kilogram. If the program is successful and the price falls, the potential has no bounds: steel manufacturing, clean ammonia, energy storage, and heavy-duty trucks, says the agency.
Providing the Rocket Fuel
The world’s first industrial-scale hydrogen plant, owned by Enel SpA, operates in Fusina, near … [+] Venice, Italy, on Monday, July 12, 2010. Enel over the next five years plans to spend 7.4 billion euros on research and construction of hydrogen plants, wind farms, solar power, and other technologies that are cleaner than its coal, gas and oil-fueled plants. Photographer: Alessandra Benedetti/Bloomberg
National Grid’s Judson says that her utility would be a corporate buyer of the hydrogen fuel. It would help balance the supply and demand, benefiting electricity customers. She says that hydrogen and renewable natural gas derived from organic waste could be blended, powering gas turbines while using the existing wires and substations.
Hydrogen can be used in fuel cells to generate power — a chemical process that splits hydrogen from oxygen. There are no emissions — only water vapor. How? For example, battery-stored solar electricity is run through an electrolyzer to create pure hydrogen gas. While solar costs have dropped by 85% over 10 years, the focus now is on achieving economies of scale for electrolyzers.
While hydrogen can be injected directly into the existing natural gas turbines or the pipelines that carry it, the blending rate is only 20%. The Intermountain Power Project in Utah is converting from a coal plant to a combined cycle natural gas plant, creating a pure form of green hydrogen and transmitting it to Los Angeles.
There are 550 megawatts of fuel cells installed across the country, says Connor Dolan, vice president of external affairs for the Fuel Cell & Hydrogen Energy Association. The users are critical faculties that can’t afford to lose power at any time: data centers and hospitals, to name two. Microsoft MSFT Corp. wants to power its new data centers with hydrogen. The cost to do so is high, but those prices will decrease.
The hydrogen hubs are essential to achieving economies of scale. “This will help bring about cost parity and drive adoption,” says Dolan, during the webinar. “We will see hydrogen for export from the U.S. We would see a huge amount of domestic production, and we might have excess to ship around the world.”
Planes, trains, and automobiles are coming. Honda, Hyundai, and Toyota are creating fuel cell-powered cars, while FedEx Express EXPR is running a hydrogen-fueled delivery truck in New York State with a range of 240 kilometers. But more than 20,000 hydrogen-powered forklifts are already here and used by companies like Walmart WMT and Target TGT .
The groundwork is laid and the public policies are in place, providing the rocket fuel for an emerging hydrogen-powered economy.
While there is excitement about the potential of renewable technologies such as tidal power, there are challenges when it comes to scaling up.
Laro Pilartes / 500Px | 500Px | Getty Images
The U.S. Department of Energy said $35 million in funding would be made available “to advance tidal and river current energy systems” under plans it hopes will provide a shot in the arm to a sector whose current footprint is tiny.
In a statement Tuesday outlining the move, the DOE said the funding opportunity — which is slated for release in 2023 — represented the “largest investment in tidal and river current energy technologies in the United States.”
A notice of intent related to the funding opportunity has been posted online. The DOE said it proposed “to develop a tidal or river current research, development, and demonstration site and to support in-water demonstration of at least one tidal energy system.”
Alejandro Moreno, who is acting assistant secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, said oceans and rivers represented “a huge potential source of renewable energy.” The DOE said the funding would come from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Read more about energy from CNBC Pro
Over the past few years a number of projects related to tidal power, including ones in the United States, have taken significant steps forward.
In July 2021, for instance, a tidal turbine dubbed “the world’s most powerful” started grid-connected power generation at the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney, an archipelago located north of mainland Scotland.
In May 2022, a £4.6 million (around $5.18 million) facility that can test tidal turbine blades under strenuous conditions was officially opened, with those behind it hoping it will accelerate the development of marine energy technology and lower costs.
While there is excitement about the potential of renewable technologies such as tidal power, there are significant challenges when it comes to scaling up, a point the DOE acknowledged in its announcement.
“The U.S. tidal and river current energy industry requires long-term and substantial funding to move from testing devices one at a time to establishing a commercial site,” it said.
“The complexity of installing devices and navigating permitting processes, combined with a lack of connection to local power grids, have proven to be a consistent barrier to advancing tidal and river current energy.”
While tidal barrage developments were the initial focus of those operating in the marine energy industry — EDF’s La Rance tidal barrage dates back to the 1960s, for example — recent years have seen companies focus their attention on different systems.
These include tidal stream devices which, the European Marine Energy Centre says, “are broadly similar to submerged wind turbines.” Compared to other renewables, the overall size of tidal stream and wave energy projects is very small.
In data released in March 2022, Ocean Energy Europe said 2.2 MW of tidal stream capacity was installed in Europe last year, compared to just 260 kilowatts in 2020.
For wave energy, 681 kW was installed, which OEE said was a threefold increase. Globally, 1.38 MW of wave energy came online in 2021, while 3.12 MW of tidal stream capacity was installed.
By way of comparison, Europe installed 17.4 gigawatts of wind power capacity in 2021, according to figures from industry body WindEurope.
