More Green Your Profession - Live Earth

Here are some ways people are greening their professions in Santa Barbara, CA and around the world.

http://www.greendrinks.org/
http://www.sustainablevine.com/
http://www.smartusa.com/index.html

Wave Power

At a meeting on June 19, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors will receive a briefing from the nation's leading ocean power expert about a proposed pilot wave power project. The wave power project will be moored off Platform Irene, north of Point Conception, and would allow for the testing of a number of promising wave power devices. This meeting is open to the public, so come and show your support for ocean power and other renewable energy technologies.

Within the vast expanse of water off our coastline is energy that could provide a significant part of our county’s electricity needs by 2020 or earlier. Ocean power technologies are varied, but the primary types are: wave power conversion devices, which bob up and down with passing swells; tidal power devices, which use strong tidal variations to produce power; ocean current devices, which look like wind turbines and are placed below the water surface to take advantage of the power of ocean currents; and ocean thermal energy conversion devices, which extract energy from the differences in temperature between the ocean’s shallow and deep waters.

The most promising ocean power technology in our region is wave power. The good news is that a recent study of California’s coastline found enough wave power potential for about six hundred thousand homes in Santa Barbara and southern San Luis Obispo County. With only about 150,000 households (420,000 people) in the county today, this is obviously far more energy than we need – if the total potential were developed, which is highly unlikely.

As with all energy technologies, the key issues are availability and cost. For the most part, ocean power technologies are very young. The first commercial facilities were installed in 2000 and 2006, in Scotland and Portugal, respectively, but most projects in the water today or slated for the near future are pilot projects. Still, while we can’t expect to see the same kind of deployment over the next 10 years that we might for more advanced wind and solar power technologies, we can expect them to begin to come online over the next two decades.

By the way Platform Irene is an oil platform off of Santa Barbara.