That year, French authorities in the province of Brittany erected the Rance Tidal Power Station. The United States built the world’s first hydroelectric dam in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1882, and dams remain the globe’s top source of renewable power.īut it wasn’t until 1966 that the energy from high and low tides started generating electricity. People have harnessed kinetic energy from the water as far back as the sixth century, when Irish monks rigged mills that used the flows from coastal inlets to grind grain. In many ways, this nascent sector harks back to some of humanity’s earliest technologies. “There are slack tides, but they’re predictable.”īehind him, the four candy-cane smokestacks of the oil- and gas-burning Ravenswood Generating Station, one of New York’s dirtiest power plants, loomed as a visual reminder of what’s at stake in finding the right mix of clean alternatives to meet the city’s electricity needs. “You can’t predict when the sun’s going to shine and the wind’s going to blow,” Banigan said. But until batteries become much smaller, cheaper and more efficient than they are today, producing power from the tides offers a dependable source of electricity to augment solar panels and wind turbines. Tidal energy, he warned, doesn’t work everywhere. Now, at last, Banigan believes tidal power is poised for a breakthrough as countries scrambling to reduce climate-changing emissions look to generate an exponentially larger share of their electricity from zero-emissions sources. The company ―which Banigan said has raised $46 million, half from Canadian, Irish, and U.S.government grants, and half from private investors ―had already spent more than two decades designing turbines and assessing viable locations. The foggy weather delayed the effort by hours.

That afternoon, the barge was supposed to arrive before 3 p.m., allowing a small armada of tugboats and cranes to hoist the turbines into the water and place them in a precise spot Verdant surveyed and measured for years leading up to this moment. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. And with the city’s last nuclear power plant set to close next year, it’s unclear how it will meet that goal with a meager mishmash of rooftop panels, battery storage and as-yet-unbuilt offshore wind turbines. In a dense metropolis like New York City, there’s little space to glaze entire fields with solar panels or erect towering forests of wind turbines. More than a dozen states, including New York, have passed laws mandating zero-carbon electricity as a way to slow global warming.

Verdant Energy’s East River project will generate just enough electricity to power 500 homes in the nation’s largest city, but it marks one of the first serious attempts in the United States to jump-start what could be a multibillion-dollar industry of tidal energy. All you can see from the surface is a set of six bobbing white buoys, but about 30 feet down the turbines are harvesting the kinetic energy of tides to produce electricity. Instead, they’d be sent overboard, craned gingerly into the depths of the tidal flat that stretches from just east of Manhattan to the western shore of Queens. They resembled propellers but weren’t there to give the boat thrust. It looked almost like it was upside down: three 16-foot rotors, attached on a triangular metal base, sat motionless atop the deck of the rusted barge. NEW YORK ― On a foggy October afternoon, a strange vessel chugged slowly through the East River’s mist toward Roosevelt Island. This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Call of the sea turbine puzzle