Rhode Island is very well placed for profiting from wind and wave energy (less so for solar power because of frequently overcast skies).

The Ocean State has great potential sites for wind turbines, both offshore and on land, and it has plenty of room for wave-energy generators — less familiar but also promising given the state’s coastal geography. There are several designs, but essentially a wave-energy collector is a large buoy containing some device — a piston or pendulum or air chamber — to generate electricity from the movement of water. These could be arrayed along the state’s southern coast, for example, where they might have the added plus of reducing beach erosion. If we get to work, Governor Carcieri’s call to generate 16 percent of energy consumed in Rhode Island from renewable sources by 2020 can be met and possibly exceeded. Indeed, the governor has expressed great enthusiasm for the idea of making the state a leader in the alternative-energy field.

But as renewable-energy companies approach the state with cutting-edge wind- and wave-energy proposals, the state Office of Energy Resources is taking its time, handing over a lot of initiative to University of Rhode Island scientists to study (and study and study and . . . ?) alternative-energy projects. It wants them to come up with a statewide alternative-energy zoning plan that would take into account impacts on wildlife, commercial fishing, navigation, coastline views and the environment.

It sounds reasonable enough until one gets to the fine print. Until this study is complete, all proposals are on hold. That gives political figures cover from incoming fire from local people wanting to make sure that the views in the pristine-wilderness area known as Rhode Island are unsullied by reminders that electricity doesn’t orginate in a switch in the wall.

Thus the effort to bring renewable energy to the Ocean State could wind up mired in the same NIMBY-fueled bureaucracy that has stalled many other important economic-development initiatives. One only has to look to the Bay State, where the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound has been tied up for years, to see how this would work.

It would be better to at least quickly try out some of these ideas in some of the more obvious places — the state has plenty of unnavigable reefs and shoals for wind turbines, and wave-power generators could go just about anywhere — and then study the results and proceed expeditiously from there. If Rhode Island were to get in on the ground floor of the renewable-energy business, there would be major spin-off opportunities. Who knows? Maybe an Australian firm that wants to sell us wave-energy generators would like to set up a production facility here, say at Quonset, where a wind-turbine maker could join it.