good morning everyone and welcome to our hearing on the arena hydro kinetic energy technology finding a path to commercialization in today's hearing will explore the role of the federal government and industry in developing technologies related to marine and hydro kinetic energy generation these technologies include devices which harness energy from waves title ocean and river currents and ocean thermal gradients development of related environmental monitoring technologies is also critical for appropriate implementation of these emerging technologies studies estimated at approximately ten percent of u s national electric demand may be met through energy generation from river in strange sights titling stream sides and wave generation this projection does not include ocean thermal energy ocean currents or other distributed energy generation from manmade water systems well there's a huge potential for energy from these technologies in the u s the u k has been referred to as the world leader in ocean energy development by the international energy agency and the electric power research institute the world renowned testing facilities of the european marine energy center are at the forefront of technology development and are the premier test bed and information center for policy makers academia and u s companies with new technologies the us became involved in marine renewable energy research in one thousand nine hundred four and acted to laws on ocean thermal energy in  eighty the congress did not authorize significant research on these technologies until the energy independence and security act of two thousand and seven since then v o a has built up a modest portfolio of marine energy r and d activities within the wind and hydropower  program of the office of energy efficiency and renewable energy this program has received a small amount of funding and it should have a right of small award so fulfill its statutory obligations in my own home state of washington d c we have funded open hydro a title technology developer based in ireland and selected by the snow homesh county public utility district to design and install a tidal energy pilot plant in admiralty inlet i'm glad we have a representative of the whole mission here with us today so we can hear about this project which is expected to begin operation as early as  produce up to one megawatt of energy enough to power roughly seven hundred homes with few exceptions merino hydro kinetic technologies will need to be competitive in the marketplace if they are to be widely deployed therefore i am especially interested to hear from our witnesses about the current projected costs of electric electricity generated from marine and hydro kinetic technologies and how a more robust federal program might help in bringing these costs down without i'd like to thank our excellent panel of witnesses who will hear from in a moment at this point i recognize the distinguish ranking member mr inglis for his opening remarks thank you mr chairman thank holderness hearing this is a timely hearing this year we've held hearings on solar wind and biomass energy sources hydro power contributes more a new of electric more renewable energy to the us electrical grid then all these other renewable sources combined depending on rainfall and water storage conventional hydro power accounts for sixty nine percent at six to nine percent of the total us electrical supply today we have the opportunity explore ways to increase the contribution from hydro power through unconventional water sources base hydro power represents a significant source of unused energy south carolina has a coastline of nearly two hundred miles and considerable tidal resources around the sea islands technologies that can take advantage of the waves current temperature differences in tides can turn our abundant coastal entitles owns into energy generators as we will hear from our witnesses these technologies will face a number of challenges related to environmental conditions and competition with recreational commercial activities i'm confident though that we can manage all these challenges to utilise this large potential energy source micro hydro represents a great opportunity for distributed electricity generation in streams and rivers irrigation canals and other bodies of water previously not considered powerful enough to for power generation hydro power installations of one megawatt or less can be deployed across the country easing the burden on our electrical grid and increasing the security of electricity users around the country i'm looking forward to hearing from our witnesses today on the current state of these technologies what we need to move forward and what role the government should play in removing barriers to development and installation thank you again mr chairman i yield back thank you mr inglis we have been joined by dr elders and also by mr smith from the brask always glad to ocean energy leader for the electric power research institute mr james dolphin is the founder and chairman of a co merit technologies l l c ms g s schneider is the chief executive officer of nato energy  minutes before your spoken testimony written testimony will be included in the record for the hearing when you have completed your spoken testimony will begin with questions each member of our panel of five minutes to question witnesses with that we look forward to recess want to thank you chairman bair ranking member english and subcommittee members it is a pleasure to testify this morning and thank you for your leadership in bringing these important marine and how to kinetic energy technologies to the attention of the american public the department of energy there's your believe that these technologies have significant potential to contribute to the nation's future supply of clean cost effective renewable energy studies conducted by university of washington virginia tech and the electric power research institute estimate that approximately four hundred ter s hours per year can be extracted from marine and hydro taking kinetic technologies in this country excluding ocean thermal systems this is enough electricity to power cleanly approximately thirty six million average american homes the department of energy's office of energy efficiency in renewable energy has allocated a substantial portion of its congress appropriations for water power to or to support of marine and hydro kinetics projects in fiscal year two thousand and eight nine point one million dollars supported fourteen hydro kinetic projects in fiscal year two thousand and nine funding more than tripled to thirty one point three million which supported a total of forty one separate projects and in fiscal year two thousand and ten we expect approximately twenty five million dollars support marina hydro kinetics projects the department provides needed research and development funding for the industry which is still at the relatively early stage of development and includes many small firms only one commercial project is currently operating in the u one hundred kilowatt in the river turban on the mississippi river in hastings minnesota therefore much of the work the department funds focus is on two major priorities one assessing the nation's resources into determining base she'll future cost of energy to analysis and testing of device performance and reliability and the extent to which there are environmental impacts associated with these technologies in order to monitor it is developing industrial department recently created and none line database for devices under development this database provides detailed information about the testing and deployment of these technologies around the world even though the majority of development is occurring in europe north america japan and south korea the database you're at the tracks one hundred  forty nine and he's working in a one hundred twenty three device which demonstrates that no firm industry consensus exists as to which technology will perform most efficiently in fact technology selection is highly dependent upon regional factors segment  in the last decade and there are currently more than a dozen domestic companies and developers in existence the size of the domestic resources encourage the development of this technology particularly in the pacific northwest second the department is committed to working with industry to develop ocean title and river current technologies for example the department recently made awards to develop the first drive train uniquely designed for large ocean care and design devices and for a pil jointly funded initial survey citing and permitting work necessary for the construction and installation of up to three turbans at a tidal energy pilot and admiralty inlet west of would be island third ocean thermal energy conversion systems use your oceans natural temperature to generate power odeh could produce significant amounts of alternative energy for tropical island communities that rely heavily on imports heals the department of security assessing otec life cycle cost testing new manufacturing methods for cold water pipes developing a national resource assessment and evaluating specific environmental impacts associated with large water intake systems furthermore to help achieve program objectives the department hawaii and the other as a partnership between the university of washington and oregon state university the department is pleased the progress of the stake in place at the center since their recent inception as an aside next week i always visit depressed afic northwest national lab square marine research facilities which worked in partnership with the centers finally to enable market development a deep barkman collaborates with the internationally electro technical commission to develop codes and standards for all three groups of emerging technologies as well as with the international energy agency to create a worldwide database of environmental research and best monitoring practices for these technologies looking to diffuse your department of security developing an industry road map this effort will and i defy to various barriers that limit progress in highlight the technology developments posties and other activities necessary to overcome these barriers the first step is essential to it to ensure that marine and hydro kinetic power can become another significant resource to the nation's clean energy portfolio in the long term appear before you today to discuss these important issues and i'm looking forward to answer any questions thank you very much before we proceed to mr barnard i want to briefly note that our colleague representative in philly from my home state of washington has joined thank you chairman baird ranking member inglis and members of the committee again my name is roger but are on the ocean energy leader at the electric power research institute a collaborative nonprofit r and d organization we appreciate  the to provide testimony to this committee on marine and hydro kinetics or m h k technology the pathway to commercialization in two thousand and four we initiated wave energy technical and economic feasibility studies in two thousand and six we followed that up with titles hydro kinetic feasibility studies and in two thousand and eight with river hydro kinetic studies in the state of alaska our studies have resulted in a substantial momentum nationwide momentum towards adding m h k technologies to our national portfolio of energy supply alternatives one measure of this momentum is the number of p the federal energy regulatory commission by private investors the reference the reference the every studies i will focus my comments today on four key points first the wave and title hydro kinetic energy resource available to generate electricity in the united states is significant second the technology to convert these resources to electricity is emerging and ready for testing in the ocean third wave and tidal hydro kinetic cost energy can be cost competitive with other renewable technologies in the future and fourth significant challenges remain defining the pathway to commercialization of the major technologies our studies indicate that total recoverable ocean wave in title  resource could enable electricity generation on the order of about ten percent of the present electricity consumption and that turns out to be about four hundred terawatt hours per year the most significant of these resources is wave energy and the locations with the most economically viable wave energy resource is hawaii and the pacific northwest is important understand though that many factors may limit the use of this technology including electrical transmission capabilities and barmen all concerns of societal considerations there are many technology come at various stages of development the development cycle for these technologies is typically five to ten years while there are now many companies ready for prototype testing in the ocean only if you have reached that stage of development as when technology was beginning to emerge into the commercial marketplace the wholesale cost of electricity was in excess of thirty cents per kilowatt hour that's in two thousand and nine dollars and with no government financial incentives technology improvements and learning through production has cut that cost to about seven cents per kilowatt hour today our studies indicate that m h k technology will enter the marketplace at a lower entry cost than wind energy did and we're progressed down a similar learning curve the key reason for that is the high power density of the m h k resource compared to say the wind or solar resource now on the other side of that coin is a challenge the challenge for the industry is to develop cost effective deployment and operation and maintenance technology given the remote ss at times hostility of the of the operating environment we believe that a robust electrical system of the future will have a diversified portfolio of energy supply alternatives our nation has investigated all known electricity supply alternatives except for one the ocean our oceans are a public resource accommodating multiple uses including the marine life fishing shipping and recreation ocean energy could be could work in harmony with those other users and provide renewable energy for the overall good of our society we it will take a sustained evolutionary effort of the net over the next twenty years to perfect m h  g technology we need to build a capability in this country to design analyze fabricate test and deploy these emerging technologies in the area of testing and test facility currently the u s marine energy industry challenged by the lack of proper and standardized infrastructure deploying test devices in the ocean we're starting to make progress the northwest national marine research center led by oregon state university and versed in washington will provide ocean energy conversion system toughest test berths for developers to perform ocean ocean testing the pacific gas and electric company is developing a pre commercial demonstration test facility known as wave connect for system testing for system testing of the rays or farms of these devices long term and consistent government funding support through this high risk research and development demonstration period is essential for building  globally competitive commercial u s industry the idea of harnessing the vast power of the earth's oceans has fascinated and tantalize humans for centuries today we may be on the cost of realizing these potential m h k technology options that we expect will prove tremendously valuable to our nation and a carbon constrained future thank you thank you chairman very ranking member mr inglis and members of the committee my name is jim deals and my work has been in renewable energy technology since one thousand nine hundred eighty mainly focused on when durban design manufacturing and helping to build the industry the companies i formed and led are today america's two winter been manufacturers of utility scale power generation the wind division of general electric with roots going back to design systems which i established in one nine hundred eighty and the second formed in two thousand and one is clipper windpower i can state from this experience of both of these driven manufacturers would three items advancing marine renewable energy is a separate program from hydro power the expected for marine energy to reach commercial readiness and large scale deployment and  partnership and when technology and implications for marine renewable energy first hydro power and hydro kinetic have little in common the basis for establishing a marine hydro kinetic program separate from hydro power is based not only on major differences and requirements for offshore marine versus land based system deployment and operation but also very different technical financial and technology maturity characteristics these two hydros have little in common advances in the new marine technology will be far more robust and will occur more quickly and with marine hydro kinetic program apart from a not under the federal program second the cost of energy deployment for a decade i've engaged in an effort to advance the scaled generation technology for both wave energy and ocean currents based on our engineering we're targeting a cost of energy for both technologies in the range of ten to twelve cents per kilowatt hour by two thousand and fifteen a level that should enable early commercialization provided the us government employments an effect of program of incentives that supports marine renewables more tangibly and consistently than the federal support for wind energy we're expecting early systems to be megawatt sized therefore meaningful rates of deployment several thousand megawatts per year should come in the twenty excel rated when compared to the history of wind solar and other renewable energy technologies also be viewed in the light of the advanced know how which is a brought forward from marine engineering and shipbuilding offshore oil submersible vehicles knowledge we now have on structural loads and control systems the winter of them's the advanced numerical model design tools and fabrication large composite structures this substantially reduces development costs and timeline furthermore the urgency that is now upon us from climate change and energy security is driving development of marine renewable energy not just in america but europe as well now was several years lead so we can expect a fast and competitive pace of technology advancement learning from win power the u s renewable energy experience shows that in a government industry partnership the fundamental factor for success is a sustained federal commitment in the face of change such as global price fluctuations or shifting national priorities that come with each of ministration or political appointee perhaps the hardest public policy lesson to come out of the american wind has been the repeated crippling effect on the industry from discussion military and government support the us was an eye clear leading position and went back in the early one nine hundred eighty s do the early support which gave birth to the industry government's support ended later that european union support stimulated rapid growth throughout the day european counties enjoy the lion's share of the industry creating several hundred thousand jobs generating upwards of forty billion dollars a year and growing at twenty percent plus annually now we're seeing massive support for wind energy in china which has initiated ten separate thousand megawatt regions representing two hundred billion dollars in a duster electively fully supported by the central government while america had the foresight and made the investment to launch a wind industry discontinuity in this support has allowed other nations to capture a major share of the long term industry and energy benefits we must not let this happen with marine renewables government board should be implemented quickly and sufficiently to sustain this emergence of this emerging industry and deal reaches industrial scale  way to close that data gap is by the responsible deployment and close monitoring of commercial scale of projects at appropriately selected sites in fact that's a very purpose and objective of our project in the puget sound our project is already recognized as one of the leading efforts to in the country we have an extremely strong a project team whose university of washington the northwest national renewable energy marine and renewable energy center every two national labs and of course the department of energy in terms of tile technology we have selected to open hydro is our partner for the project open hydro is an irish company they have licensed title chervin technology that was developed here in the united states and they one of the few companies in the world have already deployed and tested large trial energy devices and generated some data and learning from those in fact one was deployed just last month in the bay of fundy up in nova scotia the turbans utilized for our project to be very similar to those for that project in a factor similar to the ones shown in the picture that you see on the screen i'll also take this opportunity to note that the rotor on this target in rotates at a very low speed only in the range of ten to fifteen r p m and we intend in our demonstration project will consist of two to three of these open hydro turbans connected to the electric grid the project will overall be a very limited scale relative to the size of adults and let in fact it represents less than five hundred service single percent of the cross section of adults and let this figure shows to scale what a title target in a cross section a working waterway lastly this figure depicts a bird's eye view of two turbans to scale an adult and that might be hard to make out but the two small black dots that black arrow is pointing to that's how large these commercial scale turbans would adult well today our project has a grand approximately two and a half million dollars in mostly federal funding and primarily from the department of energy so that a part of the energy support both currently and ongoing will be absolutely critical to our  project with respect to environmental considerations one of the benefits of working with open hydro is they have actual data from deployment of these devices elsewhere in the year old world primarily in europe and in fact their projects have be continuously videotape since two thousand and six and today have seen absolutely no interactions with marine mammals in the turbine while the turbines are operating in terms of permeating we are utilizing the first pilot process for our permitting effort this process was developed by for exposed to facilitate the licensing of small short term removable and carefully monitored projects just like ours are reducing the baseline study burden thereby facilitating getting these projects into the water so we can gather  data over the past three years we've conducted nearly one hundred formal project communications meetings with over fifty various different stakeholder groups importantly including of course tribal governments and resource agencies one of the key challenges that we face with resource agencies in particular is balancing the small size and scope of our project with the level of baseline information necessary to support permitting it's clearly recognise that if those requirements are too burdensome pilot projects like ours will never be able to advance into the water and progress in the us will centrally be at a standstill now we believe that some resource agencies perceive that their existing can a bill you really precludes or support of a pilot process type approach for instance national service feels they have little latitude to accept anything less than very detailed and rigorous baseline studies in order to support their analysis one fact we are conducting in the neighborhood of a million dollars of princeton baseline study just for our small research and development project  at any particular site and when we say low head our particular focus is on sites that have greater than five feet but less than twenty drop the reason why we feel this is a really interesting place to focus is that there's actually quite a large amount of potential in  comparison that represents less than two percent of the toll it has been developed is about seventy three gigawatts total about seventy one remains to be developed that study actually did not even quantify an additional important source of low head hydro power that exists within our existing manmade structures  irrigation districts condescension out there thousands of miles of these existing canals across primarily in the western u s these canals all have thousands of existing drop structures drop structures were built specifically to dissipate energy to help make sure that the water losses in those canals remain within the operating constraints of the canal that's the place where we could actually pretty straight in a pretty straightforward fashion and if we had effective technology retrofit those sites to capture energy and bring that energy on to the grid  technology that exists today is very expensive when you get down to heads that are less than twenty feet the design constraints mean that using conventional technology just becomes way too expensive to develop the site and so that's where we focus most of our innovation the issue there also are environmental concerns that have to be addressed just because you have a small site that has a small amount of power output or is low head in nature does not necessarily mean that these sites are low impact so therefore responsible siting is absolutely a factor this is actually where we think canals could play a really interesting role going forward because in a lot of those settings you do incur very minimal incremental environmental impact to develop those sites many of those existing drops are closer roads closer transmission lines doesn't require getting a major new transmission infrastructure to be able to bring this power on line when you move out of existing canals and move into stream your environmental issues absolutely go up when we look at the forty thousand existing low dams in this country most of which also don't produce power we have to start to look much more closely at environmental issues like the stream passage and water flow level fluctuations this is also an area where development of monitoring technology in tools and r and d support into quantifying the environmental impacts of putting low hydro power on these existing structures will be very valuable beyond that when you start to look at putting multiple installations in series multiple loads installations in series looking at multiple had dams on a particular river stream the combined impact of those installations also has to be evaluated and that's another very important area for focus for marginal impact study and research so what are some of the ways to catalyze catalyzed catalyze innovation in th actually develop sites today at the same time we think we can get that down to about five cents a kilowatt hour and further support from the support look at r and d specifically into components to make this technology and technology such as side and the environment packs are are within the ones in which the certainly is we're finding talking to our gauging districts we can start to start to get a handle on on a lot of that but as we look to move into streams studies need to be done to effectively go through the licensing process to make sure helping to collect standardize environmental impact assessment data and make that data available would be very useful finally as private companies such as ourselves and other companies in the state are kinetic and also and brain drain technolog space as well a lot of us are spending a fair amount of our own dollars doing a lot of these kinds of environmental assessments and so some form of incentive in the form perhaps a tax credit could be very useful it would help us if we're going to go for we have  some sort of offset for that investment that we are making on our own that would be helpful in itself in summary a little bit different from the kind of the focus for the rest of the rest of the panel this is a way to talk about low head low had potential  number of questions come up more than i could possibly cover in five minutes but i'll start with a few one of the issues is very troubling mr dale said you talked about us to regard you alluded to it i'm so frustrated to see us develop technology consistently the initial technology developed here and then capitalize engineered elsewhere than manufactured elsewhere we're seeing it here again apparently one of the limitations and addition to some of the environmental issues that mr kahler mr knight are mentioned seems to be that the test beds right now or are elsewhere we don't have yet that i know of in place on either coast a reliable place where if i'm a manufacturer of some equipment i can say ok i'm going to work with her can deal we we're going to ship it out there drop it in the water and see what it does what's being done to do that disregard you talked about some potential facility and what's being done and how is the government helping with that at the federal level and what can we do better make sure my excited to talk sorry was being done is that just last year i'm sorry i take that back the the f y r wait appropriation initiated some national marine energy center specifically oregon state university on wave of washington on title university of hawaii on both otec and wave and florida atlantic university i believe received is receiving an earmark on ocean c this country we're just starting europeans are ten years in front of us they bury their governments have established test facilities have been in place now for more than more than five years so we've started what we need is as i said consistent long term sustained support to these tests facilities so that where developers do have places to go and put their machines into the water and develop the technology as step one and then prototype gets developed with the need to have systems test facility much like p g and e and are doing with a fully integrated grid grid connected array of systems with when we have these test beds ready to go  it's a number of years away it's really uncertain because of the regulatory issues associated with it we have to even permit these tests and so what is uncertainty in terms of when there's literally  dozens of regulatory agencies that have to be have to be dealt with ok that's very helpful that's consistent with the concerns of mr collar scott let me follow up on that regulatory issue because it seems that that the test bed issue as i've read the testimony listen to it seems that this test bed issue central mission deals and talked about the reliability of funding this annual extension of the production tax credits not gonna cut it we need we need a sustainable predictable capital situation including incentives but this regulatory environment issues very very central to talk to us a little bit about what you think we ought to do mr kahler really is one of the key challenges to moving these kinds of projects forward and i think a lot of  because really again that lack of data it's very much a chicken or the egg kind of situation it's difficult to get project those permits because there's no data and you can't get the data because you can't get the project permitted to get the water to generate that information so i think again it's finding ways to strike that balance within the agencies between the facilitation of renewable energy and fully meeting their existing responsibilities and accountabilities you know one of the ways that we seek to do that with our project is via the very small contained scale of the project we wouldn't advocate nor would anyone else that we're aware of you know the installation of many many turbines in a place like adults before we first installed one or two and learn from those devices but until we do that until we can do that in a reasonable way and cost and resources and  sound would say the risk of our project is almost vanishingly small but it's not zero and i think that sometimes agencies really have discomfort until they really see zero risk are you dealing with e s a issues i mean is this  concern is that we just don't know what the concern is because we haven't done it yet or are they are we saying well expectant salmon or sturgeon or ground fish or what's the story the most specific and the largest concerns  particular are the effects of this on a list of species particularly orca and salmon or those are the key species so really that's the question that we're grappling with now is what's the right degree of information in terms of the current behavior abundance of salmon species and work and of course there's a lot of information historical information available relative to those questions so it's really how much more do you need before you can go for with a project like the one we propose  disappear but it seems to me that there's a lot of potential for this you actually got is this sort of just a more efficient turban design i don't remember seeing in your testimony of a picture maybe it's proprietary you know want to share with us lest we branch out new career paths but  it is a new term in design and the specific aspects of it are basically is very simple blade which allows which kind of allows for to drive down costs the cost of manufacture is a lot lower than conventional reaction to the other commercial technology and at the same but we do i mean we have an installation that that's going forward actually with an irrigation district in arizona we just started installation at the beginning of this week so we've been through the fark exemption process receive the first exemption in september and that and that should be online and generating electricity hopefully in attention to that it's also worth paying attention to if you consider the ocean acidification problem related to the incumbent fuels the trade offs in life and we might should put the pedal  concern it's really rather small so pedal to the metal this feels happy that we're the happy beneficiaries of all your work i didn't realize we had you to thank but i thank you for having general electric is  error is in the district that i represent makes wind turbines and we have fifteen hundred engineers and fifteen hundred production people that some which work on when and when someone gas turbines but  so you are the father of that and we thank you so at for any of you what do you think about the possibility of combining a wave barges with with wind getting a benefit from the way to be all the stuff you got up on top doing the wind is that if i get that right that one of the design there are designs like that ours is one of we're between the turbans which are centered on about  twelve hundred meters you would accommodate three of the of the what we call a set of blood wave generators which are very long barges are about six hundred fifty feet long and have fifty six cost too for that you mentioned and that's the fact that you have to resources that have variability to them and you put those two together and you get less variability there are less number of hours with no resource available when you have a hybrid when way system than either a single wind or weight system i tried to sell a one of our every feasibility studies a couple of years ago on that very topic and was told by all of the state energy agency and utility client make bottles again he says the definition of sustainability is making a profit and i think that's a very good definition if you can make a profit it's sustainable if you can it is not and so that's what we need to be focused on is as we engage in this debate that we've had for some time on all different types of sources of energy and we continue to find new sources that we believe will be alternatives and  expensive oftentimes we don't compare the cost of the current methods of producing energy and are cleaning up maybe some of those pollutants that we have such as coal or look at natural gas or look at other sources we seem to get a great deal of except what about sources of energy that may or may not produce an abundance of or at least close to the same amount of energy for some recalls that's what we produce today so i think that that as we engage in this conversation is going to happen today is certainly good for us this nation to be having these hearings but i would like to hear more from each of you when you take a kilowatt being  same and how quickly can this be put online were we start using this to benefit economically in job creation how quick can this happen how soon can deploy and make a difference and we're working on some of those like for example ideally like a land base when for example and some elements of the solar technologies it's also important to not neglect longer term very large sources of energy that could also make a difference ten twenty years from now i believe this is part of the one of the roles of government some of these resources that include offshore wind some of these marine and hydro kinetic resources and i think the question is will  term technology that can make a difference and long term very large scale sorts of technologies and i mentioned a couple here and and also how do you compare these technologies to the cost of existing technology will let improve versus existing technology will are we chasing technology that will never be competitive and i would say we're currently going through a strategic planning exercise a deal we did address precisely that question and see if we  can up to my eyes or improve our portfolio in technology and it will always track because i have a situation in kingston tennessee that perhaps everyone in this room are certainly if you watch t v in the last year it would be aware that there was a the tennessee valley to help pay for that college that's a substantial amount of money that we have deferred for the last thirty or forty years and so as we engage in this debate it is my hope that we look at every situation alternative newbuild and others about whether or not this will help us get away from that situation ask the t v officials and others if we were to take that billion dollars and build a sole reform waves and the great lakes are big but they're just not as big as the pacific ocean and there's certainly there's no tile energy there's no current there's no current flow another is there is potential locations where the lakes flow when the water flows out of the lakes like they do i know and upstate new york for for for using for using hydro kinetic energy i would look in the lake but i would look at where the water flows out of the like  thank you i want to mention getting back to my comment about renewable energy this is really solar energy and we might as well identify the source correctly it's i think so submerged restroom but i don't think hard and a lot of effort appears to be going into developing appropriate turbans for this is that the best way to get energy or can you just anchor something a generator to the ocean bottom and regard yes there are there are many different ways to convert either the potential or kinetic energy in ways many of the devices do work by using totally the potential energy the up and down motion of the of the floating buoy th en reacted to the bottom or to a reactionary plate which is submerged in the which is submerged in the water column so yes many devices work through the up and down motion of the the which appears to be most promising at this point you know where we are we not far enough along in the technology to know which of the different energy conversion devices will turn out to be most cost effective in the future when has obviously gotten there you look at the wind machines the they're all open road or three bladed you know machines on a model pile with wave energy we're we're just not there yet we need to we need to test and evaluate the different energy conversion devices first thank you very much  area prior to arriving here as a freshman this year in congress i served as president and c e o of and i serve it in new york state energy research development authority which as you know has this demonstration project had the i believe we're back up and running we're not ok we're supposed to be about it but anyhow i just want to do what so homesh perhaps mr kahler mr garrett or whomever on the panel might address the your comments to what might have been learned from bird powers project in that east river demonstration certainly i think there are a number of things firstly you really have to applaud verdun i think for the effort really blazing the trail here a lot of ways for efforts like ours yes so i mean a couple things that were learned were in terms of deploy methodology in relatively shallow water folks might assume that this would be a relatively simple and straightforward evolution it's not it's very difficult even in places like the east river so there's i'm learning there obviously in terms of the robustness in the design of the germans themselves and the blades in particular you know you're going to have some failures like that along the road so you know learning from those and sharing that learning through efforts like we do is programs is important and has occurred and then last i think we also learned a fair bit in terms of monitoring technologies for monitoring the interaction of fish in real life with turbans like the virgin turbans specifically an  is using the bio sonic hider acoustic technology there are some parts of that that work really well and there are some parts that we would choose to do differently in the future so those are probably the top three things that i would point out as i understand it was not just the the the that verdant completed their experimental phase about six months ago and they and they took the six units out they got lots of good environmental data they have now fired filed a draft license application with for two to  go to the next phase which is installation of thirty of the units about one megawatt of rated power and so they will be in the regulatory process now for another year or two years before they hopefully get a license to install the next generation of turbaned in that same location between between roosevelt island and queens and about two more years and it was interesting to see what that meant to the roosevelt island population with some of the power that was exchanged for them it's hope that as much as eleven hundred kilowatts worth of power could be utilized in kinetics format in new york state so you know it's rather encouraging to see the promise adjacent to our site specifically working with seattle pacific university in fact there are a marine science lab is right on the shores where we would tend to interconnect currently we're in dialogue with them about rebuilding their marine science lab into one facility they can both serve their educational purposes as well as our need for onshore infrastructure and provide them with a pretty neat educational opportunity to leverage the results of our project to fulfill their mission thank you thank you very much we develop these technologies that you're talking about how competitive will it be as compared to other sources of electricity the range of about four to seven or eight cents per kilowatt hour but that is without counting the external costs so if you give credit for that which is a point the game of earlier  these technologies would be competitive one of the things that i have noticed seeing that i live along the coast and a lot of time i spend a lot of time in the water that and i although that's the case i have also been a supporter of offshore oil and gas development that wealthy people tend to live near water and they tend not to want to have their view disturbed and their view is more important aspect i would hope so i would really hope that some of the people who are the most absolutely enjoyed the fruits and benefits of of our society would be a little bit more considerate everybody else rather than just worrying about there you see that we have about a trillion dollars worth of energy in terms of oil and gas that we should be utilizing offshore but i would hate to  see situations like great alternatives in the future one hundred years from now whether it's ten years from now or a hundred years from now the type of ideas you're going to bring up are things that mankind is going to have to depend upon and you may be exploring an area that is really one hundred years from now we may get a vast amounts of energy from what you're doing and might be dependent upon that far more than when we are in oil and gas i would hope so that's correct and thanks for mr chairman for holding this hearing and this is something know we're looking in the future and i appreciate your willingness to explore this it's something that hasn't totally arrived commercially and your willingness to do this i'm very appreciative of i'm also appre ehlers insight that all of this is solar power except nuclear engineer geothermal i think that's a great insight the only other congressman that i've heard sherrod other than this one so thanks mr ehlers mr caller welcome and mr deals and that you may not remember but you and i spoke a couple years ago when i was writing a book and you told me about an interesting story about clipper wind in the development of wind power about a bolt that broke and you want to share that they did it kind of a metaphor for  we're talking about here remember the story you told no i remember one of the very beginning of when bower and it was a first when conference in palm springs and  t out and fortunately it could take out the date of the whole crowd but it that was one of the kind of the early lessons on structures and and how how these things after really pretty rigorous kind of engineering well i appreciate the story and the reason is despite that failure the industry is now very commercially viable and robust and is the largest most dynamic thing in the energy industry probably right now and i i sense that that's the kind of experience we're going to have in the in the in the hydro kinetic field you said something that was interesting that you were optimistic about this and maybe it was your mr better i'm not sure that that the density of energy associated with water as appeared to wind may give this industry a faster uptick than than than when you want to elaborate on that what you're for or whether you've said that you got i was myself mistranslate and the point i was making was that the the fact that the power density of the hydro kind of resource much much greater than that for wind and solar that allows smaller machines with less material and as capital cost as it is a cap attention capital cost develop the deployment technology and the operation of maintenance technology that will allow the total life cycle cost to to be less to be less than our competitors to other renewable sources thank you  seeking i'm sorry i can't if that's the correct pronunciation we were so far a little bit disappointed in the stimulus funding we haven't seen any of the stimulus funding dedicated to this particular industry is give any insight so that we have some allocation to water budget we felt that traditional hydro projects could be put in operation fairly shortly and that there was like no truly media device that was ready to go to commercial scale kinetics and that are already budget fido kinetics is fairly plentiful right now and we had what we need well we'll continue to to to try to provide you some additional resources and i were appreciative of the vision that the department has shown and hope it will continue one of the things i've introduced a bill and we're looking forward to read the introduction of a bill that would stablish a dedicated department really for this particular technology and hydro connecticut i think it would be helpful in focusing in the reason i note that is i think almost all of the witnesses talked about the importance of stability in federal policy of an of a long term federal commitment that is not dependent on the personnel that happens to sit in a particular chair for three or four years it's not dependent on whose image already is in congress but it's a long term federal commitment and i think the establishment of an office would go a long ways to helping in that regard i look forward to talking to members of the chair about that hope we can advance that thank you very much thank you mr st thank you for your many years of leadership on not only this particular form of energy but the whole issue of alternative energy and your and it's an outstanding compendium a bit dated because the transitions are happening so fast but very few members of congress knows much about this topic is mr insley and thank you for your leadership on that if i can note though i do is what i know mr deals and was one of the most interesting people i met in the production of this book and i was i remember very specifically getting to talk to him about this story and mr deal so i want to thank you for your leadership now in multiple technologies we really appreciate it if there a we've heard a lot about this issue of permitting and regulatory structure has your operation sat down with them said the other regulatory bodies and said how can we work together what changes do you need how do we make those changes happen and if you haven't can we do that we are working with our agencies on a lot of our different renewal technology i would say this is a problem that's not unique to me and how kinetics this year about specifically with m m s which has a lot of the jurisdiction offshore for speeding up permitting both for offshore wind and four million hydro kinetics technology we hope to have you in place with them shortly a d but i would completely agree with my fellow participants that this is a very serious issue and that we're putting a lot of resources against it furthermore we're doing a lot of the environmental studies to help pre amid these marine research energy centers so we can have as bad to plug in small scale marine devices fairly quickly and that's part of our funding is actually to establish that prepare a meeting that would help speed up testing these technologies that a lot of work on the permitting issue back on we got a lot of water and a lot of endangered species and and one of the things that really seems to help us to get all the agencies in a room with the with the consumers of the agency services i e the permit applicants and then try to see if you get come up with some standardized permit structures you know back home it's not the first time a dolphin has ever been put in i don't mean the swimming dolphin i mean the things you're more a to not the first time we've ever put one of those in the columbia river over the last couple of centuries and yet there was a long process where each time you had to do a brand new e a s if nobody's ever done it so they've now got streamlined mechanisms for that so my question would be has there been a meeting can joint meeting your operation with india the title hydro side with the multiple regulatory agencies with the applicants together to say let's figure out how to do this come up with some target timelines some reasonable expectations for baseline then follow up data etc particularly as we try to set up this test bed if that happened yet i help determine what are the best intervention points speed up the permitting process but this meeting is another card yet alas the way this is would that make sense to have a meeting like that would that be helpful to you i think from our perspective it certainly would be very helpful i think it's a logical next step but something we have not done to this point and i can see where it can be produced approximately the same stage and wind going back in the early eight our i'm fortunate enough to trim and bad to work for a technology organization and i don't have to get into the permitting when i when i when i had my three children and needed a larger house i even avoided adding a room it going through the permitting process i just bought a new house so i don't like to deal with the pain  wave energy being the most promising we've got a lot of big waves off our coasts and i'm glad to see that's been recognized but it seems to be the more predictable source is tidal flow and we know when it's going to happen we know it's velocity you know and i scuba dive up in that area then you literally started to the minute and some of the dives because if you're not out of that water when that tide change you've got a real problem up there so we know to the minute and that's not the case with wind it's not the case with even solar in many cases and it's a real problem up in the northwest as we try to integrate grid with unpredictable sources yet titles probably more predictable than wind what are what's what's your take on that not not more but yeah i think it's clearly more predictable the wind is probably marked predictable than a wave as well you know it certainly is not a fact one can predict the title speeds centuries in advance because they are totally dependent upon the local relative location of the earth moon s system with ways it's also a good situation and that the waves are created from storms in the pacific northwest off the japan the gulf of alaska so we know three days in advance before the waves are going to hit the beaches  mr ron barker who's a surfer would know that the maverick competition at half moon bay they call in the expert surfers one day in advance for the big the biggest waves are going to hit so that definitely the predictability is deaf and advantage when i said that wave is the most significant in the lower forty eight states there's only maybe a handful or a dozen or so really good title sites most of the ocean energy state in our country is the state of alaska they have there and it's like whitewater kayaking it is pretty exciting i'd like to offer another source of energy and that is the rotation of the planet and the coriolis effect which drives the gulf stream and the energy resource  off of southeastern united states by the gulf stream is quite enormous it's equal to about fifty times the rivers of the planet and flows twelve to fifteen miles off the coast of florida which doesn't have much else in the way of renewable energy just no geothermal cetera so that is a very important one and technology for doing that is very much like what you see coming out of wind there are so that's so that's the area we're focusing on actually great that archimedes here but that might be a no except the apparently there's no historical evidence that he ran through the streets naked shown in eureka we don't know how stable it is and it would be disastrous for europe if our attempts to extract energy from it somehow interfered with the with the flow of the gulf stream and i have no idea what circulation pattern that's a very important topic to be to be aware of just to two observations one is you know if you get into sailing i think that and just imagine that that's a beautiful sailboat out there in fact maybe we could put some colorful sort of spending or kind of sails on them and ribbons and make him look like more like sailboats i  think they're really beautiful particular when you think about how they're out there producing no emissions the rather beautiful scene you should invite people over to see out of your window what we're doing out there seems to me the other thing  incumbent fuel they're being petroleum doesn't have all the cost in if the costs were all in their proper cost accounting even for the simple thing of the defense  expenditures associated with with protecting that supply line even if that were only attributed to the price of petroleum then a lot of what we hear from that witness table would become economically viable what we're hearing today is that this wave energy title energy could become viable if the costs were in on coal the dominant incumbent technology if all the costs were in there wow you'd be in business so these ideas would not be ideas they'd be actually being deployed and being developed so i get a bill that does that is fifteen pages compared to cap and trade which is twelve hundred page monstrosity and so fifteen pages of a simple concept of a revenue neutral tax whopper reduce payroll taxes impose a tax on emissions make it border adjustable so it's removed on export imposed on import and it's pretty exciting fifteen pages gets the job done and we change economic and make it so what we hear from that table would suddenly become viable and fit with carlos  distortion in especially conservatives should rise up and say we can't tolerate market distortions because we believe in the power of markets and we believe in the power of free enterprise so thank you mr chairman for that opportunity to plug my bill is also a book  fully supports or bell and the only drawback is that it syncs less carbon in the text of the bill than does the competing cap and trade model but i think it's a much more elegant and likely to succeed strategy than the cap and trade model but the key point though is to make this technology work you've got to truly value carbon in some fashion and i think yours is a better way to do it but that trailers thank you very briefly i totally agree with the comments of of mr inglis and certainly more intelligent approach to take to the cap and trade simply add a tax and give the money back to the people a different way i also commend mr inglis on his comments about the view  could talk a little bit about the thermal potential energy because i understand it's fairly significant and we agree to dep attention of ocean terminal is fairly enormous however because of the relatively low difference of temperature within a top and bottom of the ocean you know we need still fairly large scale device enormous devices with very high capital cost so we spend the next year or two to try to validate the economics of attack and try to  and work also with the navy on that topic and try to determine what is going to the ultimate potential of driving that cause down and and therefore that will drive where would best fit you don't tropical island or for more mainstream applications electricity you can generate high pressure water to shore and use a water to reverse osmosis desalinization because you're drawing the water off of depp's you pick up about a twenty degree differential so central cooling of miami for example is a possibility and the energy payback on that is enormous if you combine the the research you will electricity that you could generate off of the reverse osmos that's the remains plus the the central cooling it really helps significantly in the economics of of that technology maybe some low head hydro applications there as well i guess i want to thank our way this is her very very fascinating work in practice and all of your cases lifetime of contribution to this important issue as always the record of this hearing will remain open for two weeks for additional statements from the members and for answers to any of the follow up questions committee may ask of the witnesses i would like personally to maybe follow up with somebody about the idea of a joint meeting with some of the regulators some of the applicants and and the research side so that we can possibly get this thing moving a little bit faster maybe a lot bit faster and with that the witnesses are thanks for their time my colleagues thank you for your input as always and thanks to the staff and the hearing is now adjourned thank you very much