Eastport, Maine Tidal Project | Trapping the Moon

When viewed from a kayak a hundred yards offshore, the tiny city of Eastport has the faux, overly tidy appearance of an HO-scale railway village. Two- and three-story Italianate brick buildings edge the harbor; on the hills  above rise wood-framed houses, most painted white. At low tide, muddy flats emerge near coves, sometimes revealing the rotting-teeth-like stubs of old piers. Eastport, Maine, can lay claim to several superlatives. For instance, it’s the easternmost city in the United States (although it may not pass muster in your  definition of “city,” as it has just 1,300 residents). It was once the sardine capital of New England, home of the nation’s first sardine cannery and at one point the world’s largest, until over the decades storms and tides and shifting American tastes destroyed the canneries one by one.

Eastport also has some of the most formidable tides in America. Topography meets the moon in this part of Maine. Craggy Cobscook Bay lies just off equally indented Passamaquoddy Bay, which itself is sort of a natural suburb of the Bay of Fundy. The Bay of Fundy, as almost everyone learned in geography class, has the highest tides in the world. It’s shaped like a tremendous funnel, and this amplifies the rise and fall. As Rachel Carson put it in her classic The Sea Around Us, at Fundy “the narrowing and shallowing of the bay in its upper reaches [compel] the huge masses of water to crowd into a constantly diminishing area.” Far up the funnel, near Truro, Nova Scotia, tides can exceed 50 feet. Around Eastport, closer to Fundy’s mouth, tides range from 12 to 26 feet and average about 18 feet. It’s still enough to make the fishing boats in Eastport’s harbor disappear from view twice each day. And twice each day the tides wend their way into coves and inlets far inland, which requires crowding past several choke points, including Falls Island and Shackford Head, which impede the smooth flow of tidal waters. So it takes an extra hour for all that water to move in and fill the natural embayments, and then an hour for it to drain out again. When all that water backs up and starts to spill through these narrows, it creates formidable currents. Indeed, some 70 billion cubic feet of sea-water—weighing roughly 2 billion tons—flow in and out of Passamaquoddy Bay nearly twice each day, or what it takes the mighty Mississippi River two weeks to convey. I lived in Eastport for four years—or, as I tend to remember it, four winters—and it was there that I learned a lot about the oddities of local tides, especially when out in my kayak. Paddling across a wide fetch, I’d sometimes hear something like a staticky, white noise gaining on me, then look behind and see an inexplicable frothy chop moving rapidly across the bay on an otherwise perfectly calm day, like something from a Stephen King novel. The chop would then sweep past me, batting my kayak around like a cat with string. Or out near Dog Island, just north of downtown, I’d suddenly hear a noise that sounded like somebody finishing a large milkshake through a fat straw. Small, slurping whirlpools would then start rising from the deep. They were treacherous, because putting my paddle into one of them was like dipping into a vacuum, the paddle suddenly offering no resistance and nearly sending me upside down. Paddling through whirlpools is like tightrope walking: Every stroke takes full concentration. Passamaquoddy Bay, I learned, can be like a Newfoundland puppy—big and playful, but cheerfully unaware of its ability to do damage. For centuries, humans have traveled Cobscook and Passamaquoddy bays to witness the phenomenon of the tides, especially Reversing Falls in Whiting Bay, and the Old Sow, the largest whirlpool in the Western Hemisphere, which periodically forms between Eastport and Deer Island in New Brunswick. In the world of tides, these are the freak shows. Still others—those of a more pragmatic mindset—contemplate the shifting tides and think that, yes, these are all quite fascinating, but nature’s leaving quite a bit on the table here. If you could harness all the natural power pent up twice daily in the bay, if you could put it to work, you could probably generate a lot of energy. Many engineers have made forays here, seeking to tap the tides of Passamaquoddy Bay and its environs. But no one had quite figured out how to make it work. Until rather recently, the kingdom of tides has proven essentially unconquerable.

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“I have great faith in the laws of physics,” Chris Sauer told me. “I was sure it was going to work, but just not how well it was going to work.” Sauer is a founder of Ocean Renewable Power Company (ORPC), which is based in Portland and has an office in downtown Eastport. Sauer was trained as an engineer. He designed co-generation and recycling plants, and for a time was president of a company that manufactured fluorescent lighting. A little over a decade ago he was living in Tampa, Florida, when he started thinking about sea currents. In particular, he thought about the Gulf Stream, which flowed offshore and up the Eastern Seaboard at a mean average velocity of three knots. That steady flow, combined with the fact that 70 percent of all Americans live near a coast, planted within Sauer’s mind the seeds of an idea. “We started the company with the idea that we’d focus on the Florida current,” Sauer explains. “But we had no technology. Nobody had a system we could buy, because those systems didn’t exist.” Sauer made a cold call to a U.S. Navy research facility in Florida that employs 5,000 scientists responsible for just about any naval equipment that comes in contact with water. “And when I met with them, they became very interested in what we wanted to do,” Sauer says. ORPC and the Navy signed an agreement; the Navy would essentially help out as consultants, advising on the development of technology to harvest energy from currents both slow and deep. “And with their guidance,” he notes, “we arrived at the design concept that we still have today.” Along the way, Sauer came to another conclusion: Placing and maintaining turbines 18 miles offshore and more than 1,000 feet underwater would be fraught with engineering challenges, not to mention costs. “It would be much easier to be a stone’s throw off the shore, and in maybe 100 feet of water,” Sauer says. “And you could do that if you were doing tidal.” So Sauer abandoned the Gulf Stream and began looking at places where powerful tides could be found. He learned that the two best tidal flows in North America are at Cooks Inlet in Alaska and, on the East Coast, the Bay of Fundy. He’d owned a summer home in Maine for years, so that made his decision easier. In the dead of winter 2004, he and his staff packed up their Florida office and relocated to a pier in Portland. “People said, ‘Either you’re committed or you should be committed,’” he recalls. But now the team had easy access to the tides of Cobscook and Passamaquoddy bays, just four hours up the coast. They could begin to take their ideas and create demonstration projects to test the technology in real-world conditions that were far harsher than in any laboratory. “We decided to do a demo project in Eastport,” Sauer says. “And when we first applied, we weren’t even familiar with the Roosevelt project.”

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The Roosevelt project: It was to tidal energy what John F. Kennedy’s decision to put a man on the moon was to space exploration. It was the largest and most ambitious of all the projects that have been proposed to harness the Fundy tides. The proposed dam triggered a flood of engineers, construction workers, and support staff into Depression-era Eastport, all in order to convert a big idea into useful energy. It had all started with a man named Dexter P. Cooper. Cooper was born in Minnesota in 1880, the son of a bridge builder. He studied in Germany and worked on river dams in Brazil, Chile, Alabama, and Iowa. He married the daughter of a Boston doctor, whose family happened to have a cottage on fashionable Campobello Island, which forms one barrier at the edge of Passamaquoddy Bay. In 1919, spending time at the cottage as he recuperated from an appendectomy, out of curiosity he installed a tide gauge on a dock. He began to think about tidal power more seriously. In 1924, he bought his own house on the island and moved there. He became a crusader for tapping the tides.

Cooper wasn’t the first to grasp the potential. The ancient Romans dabbled in it, and since the 18th century tides had been domesticated in small ways all along the North American coast. Mills were constructed atop dams that could trap the high tide within creeks and inlets, and then use the falling water to power waterwheels.  In Maine, tide mills crushed gypsum in Lubec, sawed timber in East Boothbay, ground corn in Harpswell, and milled grain in Kennebunkport. Tide mills were more reliable than stream-powered mills, which suffered from diminished flow in the autumn and were subject to droughts. Still, they had their disadvantages: The time of high tide shifted day by day, so millhands would have to rise and work at 2:00 in the morning if that’s what the moon decreed. At the dawn of the electric and turbine age, more-ambitious schemes surfaced. In 1910, the first plan to harness the Fundy tides was put forth by W. R. Turnbull, an engineer and inventor who lived in Rothesay, New Brunswick. His idea went nowhere. It wasn’t until Cooper crafted his Passamaquoddy tidal-power plan in 1920 that concept finally met concrete. Cooper’s plan was astoundingly vast in scope. You can see just how vast in a storefront on Water Street in Eastport, where the intricate, room-size model for the dam, built to sway skeptics, is displayed at the Border Historical Society.

Cooper’s original notion called for damming both Passamaquoddy and Cobscook bays and installing 100 gates to let water flow, plus navigational canals to let fishing and cargo boats pass. Dams, some of them a mile long, would link islands and the mainland between the United States and Canada, creating two vast tidal pools, which would be released in turn to power turbines that would generate some three billion kilowatt hours a year. (The Hoover Dam generates about four billion kilowatt hours.) Companies like General Electric, Boston Electric, and Midwest Utilities signed on as backers. The state of Maine signed off on the plan in 1925; the day the state legislature approved it, the bells of Eastport’s churches rang until midnight. Yet before construction could start, the project hit a snag: The stock market cratered and the Great Depression followed. Backers stopped returning phone calls. The Canadians, who were never as keen on the project as the Americans, declined to renew their agreement when it expired a couple of years later, citing new studies that the dam would harm sardine fisheries. The Passamaquoddy Dam, it appeared, was dead. Save for one circumstance of fate. In 1883 Franklin D. Roosevelt’s parents bought a summer house on Campobello Island, and there the future president witnessed the power of the tides. Roosevelt mentioned Cooper’s plan in speeches as early as 1920, but after he defeated Hoover in 1932, he was finally in a position to launch an ambitious building program nationwide to put Americans back to work. The Passamaquoddy Dam project moved up his New Deal list and was eventually granted $10 million for the first year’s work (the equivalent of about $630 million in today’s dollars). Army engineers would oversee the project. The project had been scaled back—the revised plan would involve only Cobscook Bay on the American side—and would generate only about a third of the power that Cooper had originally envisioned. When word came down that the dam had been approved in the U.S. Congress, Lubec and Eastport cele-brated anew with fireworks, concerts, parades, school closings, and (in Lubec) free beer. Eastport’s mayor announced, “This ends the Depression in Maine.” The construction of one of the most ambitious energy projects was about to get under way.

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“You have to look at it from their viewpoint,” says Chris Sauer, referring to the small army of regulators who had to approve his tidal electric project some 70 years later. “They have to legally approve an unknown technology in a resource that’s never been studied. Initially, they didn’t even know what they should be concerned about.” When ORPC arrived in Eastport, Sauer and his staff brought with them not much more than a broad concept: Drop an underwater turbine into a part of the bay with powerful currents and generate electricity on both the ebb and the flow. The devil, of course, was in the details. Working with Navy engineers, ORPC had earlier looked at every tidal design concept in play around the world. Simply put, there are two types of tidal power: those that use a dam and those that don’t. A dam creates two pools at different heights, then exploits that differential. But a dam comes with complications: more silting, and more blocking of fish and boats from traditional routes into coves and estuaries. The alternatives—in-stream generators—are all but invisible. They’re placed on a seabed where tidal currents naturally occur, avoiding most environmental disturbances. But not without economic cost: The blades powering the turbines move less energetically and thus produce less power. It’s a trade-off.

ORPC went with the latter, designing cross-flow turbines outfitted with magnet generators. Think of the paddles on a sternwheeler steamship, or a hand-pushed rotary lawnmower anchored to the bottom of the bay. When the tidal current comes in, the blades start spinning, stop at slack tide, and then resume spinning in the same direction when the tide begins to flow in the other direction. “It’s just like an airplane wing—think lift,” Sauer says. (“People either get it instantly,” he says, “or you can explain it until you’re blue in the face.”) The cross-flow turbines also had the benefit of being fairly simple and possessed of few moving parts—helpful in a punishing marine environment like the bottom of a bay. Windmill blades and generators are often damaged by stiff winds; consider that water has about 800 times the density of air, and you get an idea of the potential problems at the bottom of the sea. Getting technology from drafting board to ocean floor was one challenge. But so too was financing it all, which Sauer says took up about half of his time. (ORPC eventually secured an initial $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy aimed at jumpstarting an emerging technology, along with additional capital from private investors.) At the same time, he and his team had to navigate a thorny regulatory environment while winning over a remote, often mistrustful, community of scallopers and fishermen. They took the same tack with both: approach potential adversaries as collaborators. With regulators, they began the process early on, meeting with officials from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the state to talk through their plans. Nearly 30 state and federal agencies had some jurisdiction over them, although the vast majority of their dealings were with a half-dozen agencies. Officials were generally supportive, Sauer says, making for a relatively straightforward process—or as straightforward as something requiring a 4,000-page federal pilot-project application can be. “We developed a good rapport,” Sauer remembers. “Our approach to regulators is the same as our approach to the community: collaborate, get in early, work together.” Residents of this part of the coast have a deep-seated wariness of outsiders. “Eastport has this history of big projects being proposed, and people become very cynical about them because so often they haven’t materialized, or people start to realize the drawbacks,” explains Ed French, an Eastport native and the longtime editor of the biweekly Quoddy Tides newspaper. “In this case, they didn’t make any big promises. They proceeded cautiously and have tried to work with the community, which I think is a real difference between the Quoddy Dam project and today.” ORPC set up an office downtown and hired local people to do office work, pilot boats to sites, and construct components—including a woodworker who crafted prototype turbine blades. With the help of Will Hopkins, executive director of the Cobscook Bay Resource Center, a nonprofit dedicated to sustainable management of the local waters, they reached out to fishermen, who were understandably wary about losing access to a productive ocean bottom that is home to lobster, scallops, and urchins. Hopkins says that when ORPC initially approached him, they said they’d developed some technology but didn’t know anything about area currents, conditions for anchoring, or local fishing grounds. Hopkins appreciated their humility. As it happens, Hopkins knew a lot about those things; his center had recently teamed up with the Electric Power Research Institute to analyze the region’s tidal potential, and he had lots of connections among local fishermen. “Before they started selecting sites, I thought it might be good if they sat down with the fishermen and got to know each other,” Hopkins says. “That way, if a conflict came up, they had a little bit of history that they could reach back and count on.” Sauer agreed, and he and ORPC staffers started attending lots of meetings. “Fishermen are the most independent group of people I’ve come across,” Sauer says. But in the process, they worked through potential obstacles, mostly about where the turbines might be sited. The fishermen suggested that ORPC look at one area off Goose Island, where, they said, currents were so strong that lobster traps would be swept away. What the fishermen couldn’t use, ORPC could. Permits and local approval in place, ORPC installed a test turbine in March 2010. The results after a year were encouraging. The blades would start moving on their own when the current picked up. Seals left the machinery alone. Environmental studies concluded that smaller fish could swim through the slowly rotating blades without harm, and larger fish avoided the contraption altogether. Early fears of the blades’ becoming a Cuisinart and turning Cobscook Bay into chowder went unrealized. The test unit was pulled up, and ORPC threw a retirement party for it. The vast streams of data that it had provided about life in the deep were crunched and fed into the final design of the production unit that they hoped could feed electricity into the national grid.

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On July 4, 1935, Vice President John Garner pressed a telegraph key in Washington, D.C., setting off 600 pounds of dynamite in Eastport. An explosion filled the air, cheered on by a crowd of some 15,000. Construction crews moved in as the rubble settled, and began erecting a village to house some 5,000 workers sent there to design and build the new dam. Up went 120 houses, two apartment buildings, a dormitory, a hospital, a dining hall, a theatre, and a fire station. By January 1936, in the space of a few months, Eastport’s population had nearly tripled, and work began on history’s most ambitious tidal project. Pleasant Point was connected by causeway to Carlow Island, then Carlow to Moose Island, blocking off Half Moon Cove and forcing the tides to enter and exit via Shackford Head, several miles south. Various types of concrete were poured on Treat Island to test its durability in an arduous marine environment. But no sooner had building started than it slowed, then stopped. The Quoddy Dam and other projects, like the Florida Ship Canal, became easy targets, attacked in Washington by fiscal conservatives as being too expensive and yielding too little in benefits. “There is nothing technically wrong with the indefatigable Mr. Cooper’s vision of making the moon and the sun work for us through the tides,” the New York Times chimed in. “Neither is there anything technically wrong with making bathroom fixtures of platinum.” Congress trimmed funding sharply; layoffs began. The dam’s workforce was chopped by four-fifths, to 1,000 workers by July 1936, and to 350 by December. Dam construction was soon abandoned. The newly built and now largely abandoned village was handed over to the National Youth Administration, which set up a vocational training school for young men. (When World War II broke out, trades like radio communications and riveting were taught, and Seabees were also housed and trained here.) In February 1938, Dexter Cooper, the driving force behind the international dam, died and was buried on a hill on Campobello Island, overlooking the bay.  “The tides of Fundy will long be a moving monument to Dexter Cooper,” his obituary read. “Someday they may be put to work.” Yet the idea of harnessing the tides of Passamquoddy Bay never really died, despite the best efforts of Congress to drive a stake through its heart. Roosevelt kept the notion alive, and in 1939 tried to resurrect a joint project with Canada. In 1947, President Harry Truman agreed that the concept merited study. President Dwight Eisenhower supported a $3 million feasibility study, and President John F. Kennedy asked the International Joint Commission to review it in 1961. Kennedy called the Quoddy Dam (paired with a proposed hydroelectric dam on the border at the St. John River) “one of the most astonishing and beneficial joint enterprises that the people of the United States have ever taken.” All these proposals foundered. Then the price of oil spiked in the 1970s and ushered in another round of eager talk about cheap power, but damming the bay remained an idea essentially on life support.  (Headline in the Ellsworth American: “Passamaquoddy: The Dream That Won’t Die.”) As Popular Mechanics magazine summarized it in 1977: “There is a lot of modern thinking about tide power, but the problem is that it mainly stops right there—at thinking, not doing.” But by the late 20th century, the doing slowly started to catch up with the thinking around the globe, in modest projects in small rivers and coves, particularly in Europe. In 1966, a nearly half-mile dam with 24 generators was constructed across the tidal Rance River in France at a cost of $100 million; it produces about 240 megawatts at peak tides and hasn’t missed a tide since it opened. On the eastern side of the Bay of Fundy, in Nova Scotia, a prototype tidal-power plant was built on the Annapolis River in 1986, capturing the tide behind a dam and generating a modest 20 megawatts of electricity on the ebb. More recently, the province created the Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy (FORCE), with the aim of establishing partnerships and building more tidal-power facilities. It hopes to aid the province in meeting its lofty goal of producing 40 percent of its electricity from renewable resources by 2020. Also toward that end, in 2010, a $10 million, 400-ton turbine, about the size of a six-story building, was lowered into the Bay of Fundy. It was owned by Nova Scotia Power and OpenHydro (an Irish company). Reflecting the unknown unknowns that persist in tidal-power generation, it stopped working after a week. Recovering the unit—two blades of which had snapped off—took several more weeks.

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On a foggy and overcast day in July 2012, Chris Sauer stood before several dozen people near a boat ramp on Eastport’s west side. An outsized American flag luffed in wet winds, thunder sounded from above, and the new underwater turbine stood nearby, the colorful base adding a splash of yellow to the gray day.  “Tidal energy has arrived in America!” Sauer shouted, and the small crowd clapped. Two months later, a switch was flipped and power generated from tidal currents pulsed through a cable into a small gray building on the shores of Seward Neck, where it connected to another cable, and the electricity continued onward, feeding into a grid that powers Maine and the rest of the U.S. The news went around the globe: America had at last harvested the moon. It marked the first moment that tidal power in America had made its way from the bay into homes and businesses and the electric grid that keeps the nation humming, and a long-term contract with utilities had been signed. That wasn’t the end, of course. The moon has its cycles, as does technological progress. After producing power for a couple of months, the generator was pulled out for inspection, and ORPC found problems. Vibrations had loosened some bolts, and “electromagnetic noise” was compromising some of the data. The unit was repaired and resubmerged, but then taken out again the following year, taken apart, and analyzed; ORPC used the data gathered to design a more efficient generator, which the team now plans to install in Cobs-cook Bay in 2016; additional generators based on the improved design will go into nearby Western Passage in 2017. Meanwhile, tidal power has been gaining steam. Other companies have entered the market. And ORPC has been experimenting with a second tidal-generator design, this one created to float while being moored on the ocean floor. More significantly, the group has moved forward with river projects, looking for ways to economically harvest freshwater currents. In 2014, the team installed submerged generators in a river at remote Igiugig, Alaska, a small village that had previously depended on flying in barrels of diesel to make electricity. Sauer says that it makes sense to focus on “remote areas that are off the grid and where the cost of energy is very high.” He continues to gaze at horizons that most of us find too far off to be of much interest. Harvesting the moon—efficiently and economically—has been a challenge for generations, and may be so for generations to come. But taming the moon now seems within reach.