As I write this, California is experiencing triple-digit temperatures and is bracing for possible blackouts, about 158,000 homes and businesses in the St. Louis area are still without electricity nearly a week after storms knocked out power, and in New York, thousands of residents entered their ninth day without electricity.
And there is still another month of summer to go.
Many communities and utilities are looking to add alternative power sources to our nation's electrical grid. Most think automatically of solar and wind when alternative power is mentioned, but many see a new source of renewable energy—the ocean.
Researchers say one of the most promising sources of ocean energy appears to be wave power. It's consistent, 1,000 times denser than wind, and can be predicted hours ahead of its arrival by our ocean observing systems.
Currently, an area with good potential for wave energy development in the U.S. is in the Pacific Northwest. A preliminary permit for a commercial wave energy facility in Oregon— the first in the U.S.—has already been filed, and Oregon State University is working to develop a national wave research and development park.
You can read about Oregon's experience with wave energy and what this burgeoning technology might mean to coastal resource managers in the cover story of this edition of Coastal Services.
Also in this edition, our writers look at the efforts of coastal resource managers in Maine to conserve their state's working waterfronts. Georgia's Green Growth Guidelines and a California research project that may help coastal managers decide "if" and "where" a marine protected area might be sited also are featured.
We have now closed our survey soliciting your thoughts and ideas about Coastal Services and its sister publication, Coastal Connections. We hope to implement what you told us as we continually strive to improve these periodicals. I want to thank everyone who took the time to fill out a survey and send it in.
-- Margaret A. Davidson
