Sea Power
Activists for Wave Action
Tapping the vast energy massing off Reedsport's shores has become the dream of local leaders who have joined forces with the engineers to revolutionize power generation in the Northwest. Tom Tymchuk is one of the most avid. At 77, this former Reedsport mayor, one-time logger and retired storekeeper is right at the heart of this local movement to rethink nature's bounty and retool for a new millennium. "Since the proposed site was in our district," says Tymchuk, "I thought I'd better jump aboard and see where we can go with this."
The minute he heard about the wave project, Tymchuk encouraged his fellow utility board members to kick in $20,000 of seed money for the EPRI study. Then there's the younger Tymchuk, Keith, a schoolteacher who earned his master's at OSU and holds the post of Port of Umpqua president. Ever since getting wind of OSU's idea, he has been bumping the limits of his cell-phone contract, piling up minutes in conversations with state and national officeholders to promote the project.
Physician Ron Vail recently had the sad task, along with other members of the school board, of closing the middle school after enrollments plunged. He was "blown away" when he first heard about wave energy, which he sees not only as a way to bring family-wage jobs back to Reedsport but, in the bigger picture, as an "engine" to power hydrogen fuel production for America's future. And there's PUD executive Matt Boshaw, a self-confessed "electricity geek" who is "jazzed" about the immediate practicality of wave power for beefing up the electricity grid for coastal Oregon.
The enthusiasm of these hardcore Reedsportians doesn't mean, however, that there's no skepticism among local stakeholders. Oregon's crab fleet has broken harvest records in recent years and plies the same ocean real estate that OSU's engineers are eyeing for "wave parks." Crabbers are nursing some worries. They are intensely interested in making sure that an upturn in energy resources doesn't cause a downturn in crab harvest. But for now they're backing the project, at least in principle. As third-generation crab fisherman Scott Hartzell puts it, "Clean, renewable energy — how can you argue with that?"
Going from lab to open ocean is where the researchers will need to draw on the experience of Hartzell and other fishermen who've spent a lifetime reading waves and reacting to them, getting to know them in all their ferocity and variability from the deck of a trawler. As OSU sociology professor Flaxen Conway notes, "When you start talking about understanding the sheer power of the ocean — the winds, the currents — fishermen live out there. So when researchers say, 'We've used a model to test this device, and we know how waves work,' the fishermen will look at them and say, "I'll tell you how waves work.'"
OSU's engineers are listening. Conway co-directs the Port Liaison Project for Oregon Sea Grant Extension, which links von Jouanne and Wallace with a pool of "industry cooperators" — expert fishermen who get paid to bring their practical knowledge to the program. Terry Thompson is one. He says fishermen are essential for making the leap from lab to a "real-world scenario" in the ocean. "Man-oh-man," he says, "it's a nasty, hard environment to work in."
A world-class runner at the University of Missouri and then at OSU, Thompson gave up a berth on the1968 Olympic track team to, quite simply, "go fishin'." Although he has retired from commercial fishing, he is a Lincoln County commissioner and remains right in the thick of coastal commerce and politics. A couple of years ago, he donated his half-million-dollar trawler to the university for ocean research — research that he thinks is sorely needed to better inform environmental policies and fisheries management. OSU's wave energy project is another of his burning interests. The idea of grabbing onto the power of the ocean and putting it to practical use has intrigued him for decades.
"When you sit out in the ocean, you get slammed by big waves every day," Thompson says, leaning back in his Newport office in a pair of gently worn Wranglers and tooled-leather cowboy boots. "You go, 'God, dang, that wave hit me so hard! How can I get the power out of it? How can I turn that wave, which is beatin' the tar out of me, into something positive?'"
That's why he got excited in the spring of 2005 when OSU convened the first of several public meetings to introduce local people to wave energy and get their input. More than 100 community members jammed into a cramped conference room to listen. The fishermen put all kinds of concerns on the table: optimal depth, strongest tethers, best anchors, conflicts with river outflow, impact of magnetic fields on sea life and migration patterns, water temperature changes, durability in a 20- or 30-foot swell.
"I can promise you one thing," Thompson says. "Whatever we build out there for wave-action generation is gonna have to be one tough dude."
Topping the list of fishermen's worries is the potential impact on the Dungeness crab industry, currently Oregon's most lucrative fishery. Last season's harvest obliterated all previous records, with the state's 430 permit holders hauling in almost 34 million pounds of the prized shellfish — and injecting $50 million into local economies.
With that much money — and that many livelihoods — at stake, the potential for conflict between crabbers and wave parks is very real. That's because the same conditions that make for good crabbing also make for good wave action. For now, though, the fishing community is cooperating, encouraged by the way OSU has reached out to them.
"The university did the right thing by bringing the industry into the project on the ground floor," says Nick Furman, executive director of the Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission. "They could have sent out an e-mail or a fax that said, 'We've got this wave project out there and here's the GPS — the latitude and longitude coordinates. We want you to notify the crab fleet to stay out of that area.' That would have been the quickest way to alienate the fleet."
Furman, whose job is to be the "eyes and ears" of Oregon's crabbers, thinks OSU is going about it in the right way. "They're saying, 'We want to share this area of the ocean. How can we do it to minimize the impacts and be good neighbors?'"
