SEQUIM — The North Olympic Peninsula took a step closer Thursday to status as a global center for ocean energy.
A unanimous vote in the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee will send a $1.75 million allocation for Sequim-based tidal-power research to the full Senate, according to a spokesman for Sen. Patty Murray, the Freeland Democrat who visited Sequim’s Marine Research Laboratory in October.
“Washington state is well-positioned to lead in clean tidal technology, and this funding will support the research to keep our state on the cutting edge,” Murray said in a prepared statement earlier this week.
The funding, if passed by both houses of Congress, will come to the Sequim Marine Sciences Laboratory, the coastal arm of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
The lab, on Sequim Bay just outside the Sequim city limit, is operated by the Battelle Memorial Institute and took in $12 million in government and private research contracts last year.
The Sequim lab has long been an innovator in alternative energy research, its director Charlie Brandt said.
Murray toured the facility last fall and, as a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, pushed for the $1.75 million in research funding in the fiscal 2010 Energy and Water Development appropriations bill.
The legislation will now go to the full Senate, Murray staffer Eli Zupnick said Thursday. He didn’t estimate a time frame for debate and passage.
If Murray’s bill does clear the Senate, it will go to the U.S. House of Representatives, where it must gain approval before the Sequim funding is allocated for the new fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.
George Behan, chief of staff for Rep. Norm Dicks, the Belfair Democrat whose 6th Congressional District includes the North Olympic Peninsula, said Thursday that Dicks will work to assure that the bill is debated in the House by September.
The infusion would fuel a small increase in staff, Brandt said, but primarily it would go into existing scientists’ exploration of how to harness the power of seawater to generate electricity.
‘Premier tidal power resource’
“We sit on the premier tidal power resource in the country, at least on the West Coast,” he said.
The Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound have enormous generating capacity, he said, and unlike wind, the sea’s power runs 24 hours a day.
“The tides,” Brandt added, “are completely predictable.”
The frontier, he said, lies in turning those tides into a clean power plant without harming the ocean’s web of life.
The money from Congress will help his team “remove the roadblocks” to tapping into a renewable, sustainable form of energy, Brandt said.
Scientists at the Sequim center have already developed a “fish-friendly” turbine, a device that can be used in tidal-power generation without damaging fish and other organisms, he said.
And the lab, with its tanks, terminals and specialists, is equipped to test tidal power systems without actually going out to sea.
The scientists and engineers can create biological conditions exactly like any water body in the world, Brandt said.
Tidal-energy devices generate electromagnetic fields, “and we don’t know the extent to which they disturb fish and other life in the water body,” he added.
European scientists are already testing tidal and wave power capabilities, with installations off the coasts of Scotland, Sweden and Portugal, Brandt said.
South of Vancouver Island, the Race Rocks tidal current generator was installed during the summer of 2006, but the system’s performance fell below expectations, and it was decommissioned in 2007.
Brandt is optimistic, however, about Sequim’s future as a tidal-power center for North America.
“We’ve had a major focus on renewable energy for years,” he said. “We appreciate the senator’s confidence, and we look forward to being able to deliver.”
The first effort to create a tidal generator on the North Olympic Peninsula, which was in Makah Bay by a private company, was suspended earlier this year.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
