The University of Maine is one of 17 organizations that will be receiving part of a $16 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to continue funding research related to capturing tidal energy.
The UMaine project is being conducted in relation with the School of Marine Sciences under the Fish Assessment Study Team of the Maine Tidal Power Initiative. The research has and will be focused on the effect tidal turbines have on the surrounding environment.
The $500,000 project received $400,000 from the DOE grant. Portland-based Ocean Renewable Power Company, who is engineering the “marine hydrokinetic” turbine that the UMaine project is based on, matched the remaining $100,000. ORPC received another part of the DOE grant to build this device.
Marine hydrokinetic turbines are intended to capture energy from the flow of water, in the case of this study, that means the movement of tidal waters. While it has the potential to be a significant addition to our nation’s energy portfolio, no research has been done on the effect it will have on the surrounding environment.
“Our project is to study how fish will be, or may be, affected by the device which captures energy from the tides,” said Gayle Zydlewski, associate professor of Marine Sciences and head of the Fish Assessment Study Team.
The big question, Zydlewski said, is “how do we make devices to capture energy, and then how does that affect the environment?”
According to an Aug. 29 press release from the Department of Energy: “As this nascent energy industry grows, these projects will help ensure that potential environmental impacts are addressed proactively and that projects can be developed efficiently and responsibly.”
The Maine Tidal Power Initiative and Fish Assessment Study Team has been receiving funding from the DOE since 2009, when research on this project started. “In order to understand any effects you have to know what things were like ahead of time,” Zydlewski said.
The research is being done in Eastport, Maine, at the turbine location site. The turbine is currently out of the water for maintenance repairs, but it is hoped to be back in and working by late spring.
In the meantime, the research team will be able to use the DOE grant to purchase new software that will allow them to reanalyze data collected in the past five years and look at the different fish species that inhibit the turbine site.
In March, the team will go back into the field to collect additional data on the fish environment at the location site. Once, the turbine is in the water, data collection will be multiplying what they were doing previously by three.
Aside from the national and international implications that this project is hoped to have, Zydlewski is excited for the educational opportunities it will bring to her students and the University. “It’s nice to be able to show them firsthand what is happening in their backyard and the future for renewable energy,” said Zydlewski. “There is no study like this being done elsewhere.”
Haley Viehman, a doctorate student and part of the Fish Assessment Study Team, said that when she heard about the project as a graduate student it was “just exactly what I wanted to do.”
”Hopefully we can start harvesting our own energy resources responsibly instead of depending on everyone else,” Viehman said. “It can make a big difference if we can get stuff like this or offshore wind off the ground, and environmental assessment is definitely important for that.”