The Golden Gate Energy Company, the City of San Francisco, the County of San Francisco, and the Pacific Gas and Electric Company signed an agreement on Tuesday, June 6, 2007, to conduct the one-year study.

The $1.5 million-plus study will research the economic feasibility, technological availability, wildlife and environmental impact, and energy potential, among other considerations, of building turbines on the floor of the waterway passing under the Golden Gate Bridge, which is located between the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean.

The passageway beneath the Golden Gate Bridge  contains powerful water currents that could be used to cleanly and efficiently generate electricity.

An earlier study performed by the Electric Power Research Institute showed that the San Francisco Bay area to be one of the world’s best sites for electricity generation using tidal power technology. In addition to being an excellent site for tidal power generation, the building of tidal power machinery under the water avoids having to use precious land in the San Francisco area, eliminates unsightly structures on the land, and is very clean to operate. Tidal power is also highly predictable and reliable.

If the study’s result were to be implemented into a pilot project, it would take an estimated three-to-five year period to complete to construction.

Currently, as an example, in the United States a small underwater turbine project is being used in the waters of the East River (New York City) in order to generate electricity for the operations of a grocery store on Roosevelt Island.

Other pilot projects are currently at various stages of development in Asia, Europe, and Australia. Among these projects include a project in the Strait of Messina, Italy, that was started in 2001; an Australian venture off the Gold Coast, Queensland, in 2002; a Norse development in the Kvalsund (south of Hammerfest, Norway), in 2003, and an English project off the coast of Devon, in 2003.

Tidal power (tidal energy) technology is a type of hydropower technology that uses changes in water levels due to the tides (or the movement of water due to tidal flow) to generate electrical power. Because tidal power uses the tides—which are generated by the interplay of the force of gravity among the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun—it is a reliable, basically inexhaustible, renewable, and clean source of energy.

The type of project implied by the San Francisco study—which would use underground water turbines (to control water)—is similar to wind turbines used on the land (to harness wind).

Because of current work being performed to provide alternative energy sources to the San Francisco community, along with other important future alternative fuel considerations such as the tidal power technology study, San Francisco major Gavin Newsom calls San Francisco one of the “most progressive environmental cities in the country”.

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