CASTINE – Maine Maritime Academy has cleared an initial hurdle in its effort to develop a tidal power test center on the Bagaduce River.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission this week approved a preliminary, three-year permit that will allow the college to study the feasibility of the project and to identify and evaluate potential sites for the center along the river.

The preliminary permit will give MMA the priority of application for a license during the three-year period which prevents another entity from applying to FERC for a license for a similar project in that area. The permit, however, does not authorize the college to begin development of the project or to construct anything in the river.

“We’re pleased to have the permit,” said Eleanor Courtemanche, MMA’s chief advancement officer. “This will allow us to continue with the planning for the project.”

The focus of the project is to provide a testing and evaluation center for tidal energy generators and to provide education and research opportunities for students and faculty at MMA. It will include a number of test platforms in the river that the college would make available to venders who design and manufacture tidal generators to test and evaluate their new devices.

The college, which is working as part of a consortium that also includes Maine-based Cianbro Corp., initially identified two sites on the river for study: one near the MMA dock in Castine Harbor, the other at The Narrows, north of Castine where the river flows into Northern Bay and South Bay.

The preliminary permit starts the clock for the project planning, according to Mark Cote, chairman of MMA’s engineering department and newly elected president of Tidal Energy Development Center Inc., the nonprofit corporation established to oversee the project. The college must develop a plan to study the river and to file it with FERC within six months.

“We’re going to have to assess how we are going to evaluate the state of the river, how we evaluate which sites are good,” Cote said. “And if we’re going to be testing these devices, we have to determine what data do we want to get.”

By next month, the college will begin to bring together a lot of people from different disciplines to begin working on the planning process. In addition to MMA faculty and students, the process likely will draw on faculty from the University of Maine, along with some graduate students, as well as state agencies and local environmental groups.

The college already has met with several local environmental and conservation groups to discuss the initial phases of this project and will continue to include those groups in the planning process, Courtemanche said.

“We need to develop an understanding of the unique aspects of the whole Bagaduce estuary and the potential impacts that tidal energy might have,” she said. “In this arena, there are no standards for testing the impacts of these devices. This technology is in its infancy, so we want to work with people to form a number of perspectives to understand what the areas of concern are.”

By identifying the environmental concerns early in the process, the center may be able to provide assistance to the people who are developing the new devices, so they can be designed around those concerns.

“That way we may be able to develop an energy source that is truly renewable, clean and usable,” Courtemanche said.

It is unlikely that the permit will generate much initial activity on the river, Cote said. If they do anything on the river in that time, it will probably be limited to placing sensors in the river to study its characteristics.

“We need to get a good idea of what the river’s status is now before we put anything in the water,” Cote said. “One of the advantages of this process is that there has never been a systematic study of the whole estuary. Our students have done studies up and down the river, but this will be a more systematic look at the whole watershed. We really need to understand what’s going on there before we do anything.”

The college plans to schedule a forum sometime next year that would bring together a variety of constituents to discuss the project and identify areas that need to be addressed. Those ideas will be forwarded to an advisory committee that will be established soon, which will work with the board of the Tidal Energy Development Center as the plan progresses.

In addition, the college has hired Jarlath McEntee, an engineer with a background in renewable energy development, to serve as support staff for the new corporation. McEntee and Cote are scheduled to attend an Ocean Renewable Energy conference in New Brunswick next month, along with other private partners in the project.