EASTPORT – The Washington County municipalities of Eastport and Lubec have been identified as Maine’s best potential locations for a tidal power demonstration project that would harness energy from the ocean and turn it into electricity.

“If things look good for Eastport especially, I think the state would try and find a way to build at least a demo plant,” Roger Bedard, the manager for the California-based research institute behind the project, said Tuesday. “We don’t know yet who would fund this; that would have to be determined. But we could work with the state and try to make this happen.”

Maine, three other states and three Canadian provinces are all potential sites for tidal energy plants that would produce enough electricity to power thousands of homes in a pilot phase.

Using a $60,000 grant from the state-funded Maine Technology Institute, the Electric Power Research Institute of Palo Alto, Calif., recently completed a review of 40 coastal communities within Maine to see where a tidal power project would fit best.

Ten of the sites were visited by an oceanographer and site selection consultant from Virginia Tech University. That took place in coordination with a summer resident of Lubec who is a retired senior power executive from California and a member of a local advisory group.

The ultimate selection of the Eastport-Lubec area as Maine’s bid to land a pilot project means Passamaquoddy Bay may end up as one of seven sites used in the study.

Washington, California and Massachusetts, plus the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, are the other sites tagged as finalists by the Palo Alto researchers.

Pilot projects could be located at some or all of the seven targeted sites.

Eastport and Lubec will now be further evaluated as part of an economic feasibility study – the first of numerous steps before the site can be approved for the project.

The project would employ an underwater turbine technology that depends on the free flow of the tides rather than dams.

Kevin Raye, Washington County’s state senator, announced the project this week.

“Thought this is only a first step, it is a hopeful signal,” Raye said in a prepared statement. “I believe this project holds great promise.”

Raye noted that the area’s powerful tides, strong local interest, and history as home of the former Passamaquoddy Dam tidal power project combine to make it an ideal location to test a turbine generating system.

Raye also noted that the project offers potential for increasing economic activity in Washington County.

Ocean-generated power research and development is well overdue in the United States, said Bedard of the Palo Alto group.

“About two and a half years ago it occurred to me that the time is right in the U.S. for ocean energy,” Bedard said in a phone interview Tuesday from California.

“Nothing has been done since the early 1970s, when the Department of Energy wasted a lot of money on ocean thermal conversion, which didn’t work. So I called up the state energy agencies in all the states that have good wave climates to see which states were interested.”

Maine was among them.

But research on energy drawn from waves at Old Orchard Beach in 2003 and 2004 was surprisingly disappointing.

Now, however, the same researchers are considering tidal-generated energy within Maine. Bob Judd, the summer resident of Lubec, is the one who convinced Bedard’s group to try the Passamaquoddy Bay for its tides.

“He suggested that Eastport and Lubec would be the prime places where you would put a first [power] plant, by far the most powerful of the tidal resource areas in Maine,” Bedard said.

Bedard will come to Maine next May to determine whether Eastport and Lubec pose economically viable possibilities for sale of tidal energy into the power grid.

“This confirms the extraordinary quality of our natural resource, and its potential for increasing energy self-reliance,” Judd said of the Eastport and Lubec selection.

The project’s possibilities were reviewed on Aug. 26 at a meeting in Lubec with Judd and George Hagerman, a site selection consultant and oceanographer from Virginia Tech University.

Those who took part in the Lubec meeting were Raye, representatives from the offices of U.S. Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins; representatives from Lubec (Selectman William Daye and Town Administrator Maureen Glidden); and a representative from Eastport, City Manager Bud Finch.

Also taking part were Lubec residents Harold Bailey, Peter Boyce, Dick Hoyt and Robert Peacock; Davis Pike, Lubec’s harbor master; Will Hopkins of the Cobscook Bay Resource Center; Kathy Billings of Bangor-Hydro; Michael Mayhew of the Maine Public Utilities Commission; and Michael Szemerda of Cooke Aquaculture.