June 8, 2010 - tidal power in history: Winnegance to Passamaquoddy

I was fortunate to use wind power yesterday afternoon: I went sailing with a colleague on his Hunter 41. While on my way to the dock in Falmouth, I stopped by the site of a historic tide mill:

From Energy Policy Update

This isn't the best photo, but beyond the picnic table, you can see a stone pier extending across the mouth of Mill Creek. It seems information on the history of this mill site is limited, but it is suggested that it milled grain, and then lumber. The Town of Falmouth maintains a short but nice trail here, although parking is very limited.

In 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Federal Writers' Project, a program under the WPA designed to put writers to work while promoting economic development through tourism and industry. The project published 48 state guides to America (plus Alaska, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.) known as the American Guide Series. Each state in this series compiled its own detailed histories and descriptions of every city and town, along with narratives of interesting automobile tours.

Yesterday, I looked at the history of tidal power development at Winnegance, near Bath and Phippsburg, Maine. The 1937 Maine Writers' Project Guide describes the one remaining tide mill at Winnegance:

At 3 m. is the junction with a dirt road. Left on this road to a Tide Mill, 0.4 m., which until 1935 was used for cutting lumber. This old structure is a primitive forerunner of the mills and factories planned as part of the Passamquoddy Power Project.

So we can see that by 1937, policymakers including the federal government were reconsidering Maine's tidal power resources. Winnegance's tide mills were just on their way out, but the Passamaquoddy Power Project was just on the eastern horizon. Tomorrow I'll look at the 500 MW PPP in more depth.

June 4, 2010 - tidal power in Maine, a history, part 1

Humans have harnessed the mechanical energy of tidal fluctuations for a long time -- at least as far back as the Romans in 600 A.D., and possibly as early as 200 A.D. The exact mechanisms vary, but the basic idea is to convert the potential energy of water that has been lifted by a high tide as it falls to a lower elevation. Typical sites are on tidal estuaries or rivers: sheltered from the effects of open ocean waves, but salty enough to have a significant tide.

Tide mills were common in Maine, especially just downriver from my house in Bath. At Winnegance, on the Bath-Phippsburg line, a bend in the Kennebec River with a natural cove made for optimal conditions for tidal power.

The History of Phipsburg, Maine, from George Varney's 1886 A Gazetteer of the State of Maine, describes some of the local resources:

At the north looms Parker’s Head, and at its south-western side is the inlet basin forming the tide-power known as Parker’s Head Mill Pond. Next succeed the harbor at Phipsburg Center, with Drummore Bay two miles above, with inlet and tide-power. Through Fiddler’s Reach, a curve of the Kennebec around the northern end of Phipsburg, we pass to Winnegance Creek, nearly three miles in length, and a basin at its extremity, forming two unsurpassed tide-powers, and separating Phipsburg from Bath and from West Bath except for a neck 200 rods in width, the Winnegance Carrying Place.

The History gives more detail on the Winnegance mills:

On the Winnegance Tide-Power, three miles from Bath post-office, and four miles from Phipsburg Center Village, have been sixteen mills, nine on the Bath side and seven on the Phipsburg side of the line. Some of these, however, were burned several years since. There are now ten sawmills and one grist-mill operating in the town.

So why Winnegance? The site was right, in that the coves and tide range were ideal. Furthermore, the site was near the mouth of the Kennebec River, where millions of logs floated downriver every spring and summer for processing into lumber, and loading onto schooners to send the boards to markets around the world. Many of the older houses in the Winnegance and Bath area, ours included, bear the marks of the kind of up-and-down tide-powered saws that operated there.

I'm curious to learn more about why tide mills largely vanished. (At Winnegance, the Morse & Sons Lumber mill still operates where the Morses have run it since 1801, but it no longer apparently harnesses the tides.) An interesting piece in Discover Maine Magazine points to the inconvenience of the timing of tidal power. If you are limited to tapping the ebb flow, the time of the peak drop will move -- at Winnegance, each high tide is 12 hours, 22 minutes later than the previous -- so some days, your power resource will only really be operative at night. I'm not sure this was enough to eliminate most of the tidal power development in Maine, but it was a start.

I'm also going to look at more ambitious historic tidal power plans like the Passamaquoddy Power Project.

01/29/2010

Exciting news from my home town: U.S. Windblade of Bath, Maine is unveiling the first composite underwater turbines built in the U.S. Designed by Portland-based Ocean Renewable Power, two turbines are linked to a 60 kW generator. These first turbines will be installed in downeast Maine (Cobscook Bay) to demonstrate and evaluate the potential for tide/current generation.

Massachusetts has issued its triennial plan for energy efficiency measures. The plans set an electric energy savings target of 2.4 percent of sales in 2012 -- several times more than the 0.8 percent savings through previous measures, and on the opposite side of zero from the about 1% annual load growth of recent years. If Massachusetts utilities pull it off, they anticipate saving 2,600 gigawatt-hours of electricity. Massachusetts anticipates that it could meet nearly 30 percent of its electricity needs by 2020 through energy efficiency measures alone. On the gas side, the plans set a savings target of 1.15 percent of natural gas sales in 2012.

Meanwhile, is cap-and-trade going down in flames? Reports from the World Economic Forum in Davos indicate a business-leader consensus that stimulus, not cap-and-trade, is the more efficient way to change behavior.

And from the Bangor Daily news: