Slashdot Mirror
Wave Driven Generators
nickovs writes "The BBC report that the worlds first commercial power station powered by ocean waves has gone on line. Built by WaveGen, who have issued this
press release, the system uses the swell from waves reaching the shore to force air through a Wells Turbine which has the neat property that it turns the same direction irrespective of which way the air flows through it.
According to WaveGen "It has been estimated that if less
than 0.1% of the renewable energy
available within the oceans could be
converted into electricity it would
satisfy the present world demand for
energy more than five times over". Now wouldn't that be nice?" Nice trick.
There's one in Bretagne (France) since the 70's. I can't remember where exactly (near St. Malo ?), but I've visited it around 15 years ago.
From the CIA world fact book, I see that the 1998 power consumption of the UK was 343 billion kWh. This translates, by my calculation, to about 78,000 of these LIMPET generators. From the pictures I estimate that they are about ten meters wide. So this gives us a total of 783 km of coastline to match the entire 1998 electricity demand. The coastline of the UK is 12,429 km. So we would need about 1/15th of our coast to match out requirements. Of course we are lucky on this count because we are a small island with large ratio of coast to area. Anyway, gives you some idea.
Rupert
Well a "back of the napkin" calculation gives you 0.07% of the earth's surface, if they run close to 100% efficiency. Unfortunately thermodynamics won't let you get anywhere near that.
--- If stupidity got us into this mess, why can it get us out?
Depends. PV technology ranks as a poser in the green energy industry- I'd rather they burned coal. It's closer to nuclear in terms of dirtiness in just about every category imaginable.....with today's alternatives, the only appropriate use for PV as a green resource is in remote off-grid apps.
It is, and was at the time, well known that there were and are a number of safe options for the disposal of nuclear waste. New and better ones are constantly being developed.
What options could you possibly refer to that would reliably last the 10000+ years it takes for most of the radiation to die out? Whoever led you to believe this was either stupid or trying to deceive you, IMHO. Or both.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
The described way sounds neat, but other ways exists. In a research project in my native country (Denmark - we're almost entirely coastline and no inland) some smart guys tried to use the wave action to move a rod up and down by having a float on top of it. The point was that the rod was magnetic and moved up and down in an inductor coil, thereby producing electricity.
Not sure if it ever amounted to much in terms of actual produced energy, but it did prove that it was possible. The cool point was that this didn't necessarily have to be located near the coastline, but could be moved a dozen kilometers out to sea, making it invisible from the shore due to the curvature of the Earth.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
The moon is going somewhere. It's getting further away from the earth by nearly 4 cm per year.
Regardless of whether you agree with the person posting this, it shouldn't have been modded down. That's pretty messed up on the part of the moderators; it was posted by someone who has obviously done a little bit of research. I'm sorry you all support Ralph Nader, but why is this modded down? Solely on ideological differences, not on any real basis. If the moderators are going to mod down well thought out comments because of ideological differences, the whole point of comments is gone. So, please, mod this post up.
I really don't see what is so bad about nuclear waste. I work at the Oak Ridge Nation Labs, home of the bomb and alot of nuclear waste. If the public wasn't so fearful about nuclear contamination, we would be able to just send the fuel down into the mantle or at least store it below the water table. There are alread plenty of radioactive isotopes below the surface and they don't seem to bother anyone there.
OK, got my facts wrong here. I messed the "James Bay Project" up with some other projects.
a pper.htm
I did however find an OK link to some info that people might find useful. It mentions a 240MWatt generating plant off the coast of France.
http://www.calpoly.edu/~cm/studpage/nsmallco/cl
But hey, if that little idea I proposed ever did get built (I think cold fusion will come around before anything like that could happen), it would be impressive!!
Willy
According to this page: http://www.uilondon.org/sym/1998/pa ulu is.htm
Uranium reserves that are cost-effective to mine will be enough to supply for around forty years. This is assuming that demand stays constant. Demand for nuclear power may well do that, but power demands in general tend to rise in a geometric fashion.
But there exists today a perfect nuclear reactor. It's clean, no waste, basically never needs refuelling. It produces more power than we'll be needing in a long, long time. If you want to check it out, look up next time you're outside when it's not cloudy.
How to capture that power is another matter. Current solar cell tech is somewhat lacking. But the energy is there, we just need to go fetch it. (Don't use figures of how much energy the sun puts into the Earth here. Obviously we would be collecting from space at some point or another.)
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
My wife and I visited the Annapolis power facility about a month ago during our vacation. Just to add to the comment:
:)
They'll give you a tour if you ask nicely, though it's warm down there. You can see the turbine and the gates, plus a lot of expensive looking old-school computer equipment that wouldn't be out of place in an early bond movie. The turbine was made in Switzerland, and is the largest of its kind (i seem to remember). It only generates power in one direction.
There are at least two other stations like this one -- one in france with multiple smaller turbines and one in china. I also heard about a Norwegian station that used the air blown through a bore in a cliff next to the ocean to drive a turbine -- interesting idea.
If you want to really feel the bay of fundy's tides, go "brownwater" rafting down the Shubenacadie river. 10 foot tidal waves. Gotta love em.
Finally, all you Silicon Valley types (like me), Nova Scotia is an amazing place to visit (and you'll drool at the housing prices
just my blog and pix
I remember standing behind the turbine's vent, I nearly got blown over the railing from the wind's force. You gotta be awed by Nature's power sometimes.
As I recall, this single turbine provided like 15% of Islay's total power usage, straight to the power grid. Glad to see it move on from the research stages.
a beowulf cluster of these things in a kiddie pool with thousands of Pillsbury dough boys jumping in and out of the water?
Seriously, I have been fascinated with the potential to tap into the energy of tides and waves for some time, even visited a Tidal Energy Project down east last year and this summer I was amazed to pass by one of the largest wind farms in Canada, I only wish our timing was such that I had been able to visit the site. I tell you, coming around a bend in the coastal highway to the site of these huge wind turbines seemingly marching across the hills beside the ocean was quite something!
I am glad to see things like this (and hybrid cars, etc) getting more and more attention. Here in Canada natural gas prices have skyrocketed in the last year. Why? Well, a banker buddy of mine tells me it is a matter of supply and demand (I knew I should taken at least one econimics course) and most of the demand is for electrical generation....can you beleive that? burning gas to make sparks...how ridiculous....now, if only I could find a link to that nutty idea of putting solar collectors on the moon, and microwaving it down to earth.
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
"Rock over London, Rock on Chicago.
Wheaties, Breakfast of Champions"
I am currently not obliged to divulge that information as it might compromise the agents in the field
but enviro-activists can be pretty touchy
yes we an be...
"you think thats air you're breathing?"
Better yet, you think that's water your swimming in.
"Rock over London, Rock on Chicago.
Wheaties, Breakfast of Champions"
I am currently not obliged to divulge that information as it might compromise the agents in the field
(I'm using the example of Diablo Canyon below because I'm most familiar with it, and because it's frequently cited as "one of the safest" plants around.)
- Pollutes less? Nuclear fission not only pollutes, but for vast lengths of time - the pollution remains quite toxic for longer than the current age of literate civilization. They still haven't figured out what to do with the waste material generated from Diablo, but that didn't stop 'em from hitting "Start" - they're just going to store on-site indefinitely. And the heat pollution from the plant has demonstrably (and, as a recent decision and fine shows, illegally) altered the ecology of the nearby cove.
- Less dangerous? Several decades ago, a number of petroleum tanks in San Luis Obispo caught fire, filling the sky with black clouds. Chunks of flaming tar fell on the town. About as bad a disaster as you could ask for in the petroleum scene. Today cow pastures line "Tank Farm Road" - what would happen to the agriculture and habitability of SLO county if Diablo pulled a Chernobyl?
- Costs less? PG&E is taking a loss on Diablo Canyon. Yup, that's right. They aren't even going to break even.
As far as I'm concerned, nuclear fission can stay sustainable and reliable "on paper" until we can fix its substantial real-world problems.Quiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
And for an extra boost you could drop some poo in there. A form of over-clocking? Or maybe it should be called over-pooing?
Execute? [Y/N] _
However, large-scale on-shore wave power generating stations could face similar problems to those encountered by some windfarm projects, where opposition has focused on the aesthetic and nose impact of the machinery on the environment.
My, my, what violent opposition. I personally don't think it's worth a shot to the nose.
I'm totally off-topic, I know. Moderate as you will.
Sorry, but that typo was just too hilarious to ignore.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
They have those already on Iceland, if memory serves me correct...
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Some background about this method of energy production.
I also saw some stuff about Wavegen developing "Powerbuoy...an offshore multi MW floating wave station in conjunction with the oil industry...".
All of these sound neat, but how many of these things would you have to have to actually produce serious (enough to power cities) amounts of power?
www.code-fix.com
PV technology...is closer to nuclear in terms of dirtiness in just about every category imaginable....
In order of clean to dirty (with a lower rank being cleaner), the three technologies being discussed rank:
1. Nuclear
2. Solar photovoltaic (PV)
3. Coal
PV and coal are close together in dirtiness compared with nuclear which is awkwardly cleaner. Using the industry-standard linear-no-threshold theory of radiation danger (which is biased against nuclear power and has been proven to be false), the eventual deaths caused by one large nuclear, coal, or PV powerplant run for a year are calculable as:
Nuclear: -420
Coal:_____175
PV:________85
Nuclear comes in at right around 1/3 of a death (from high-level waste, low level waste, and routine airborne emissions), until you consider the radon gas exposure that doesn't happen because the uranium that would have produced the radon was mined out of the ground and burned in the nuke plant. Then you get 420 lives saved.
Coal deaths are from air pollution, radon emissions, and chemical carcinogens.
PV deaths are from the coal power and the cadmium sulfide used to make the panels, with the bulk of deaths coming from the cadmium sulfide.
Source: Chapter 12, More on Radioactive Waste, from Bernard L. Cohen's The Nuclear Energy Option: An Alternative for the 90s.
Not a clue -- checking my Rectal Database, I figure that somebody built one first (50 or 60hz, whichever), and somebody else built another slightly differently. From that, we now have PAL/SECAM/NTSC, 110/220/240 volts, bizarro mains plugs, and other pretty silly differences.
Maybe a patent fight, or maybe because of the distances involved in transporting power in the US means 60hz is better.
Similarly, we poke fun at Canadians. We can't poke fun at Mexicans (as it's politically incorrect), so instead we make vicious racist slurs and stereotypical judgements. I just love human nature...
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
corvi42:
You are citing deaths and injuries which are a direct and immediate result of the meltdown. These statistics do not calculate the deaths and injuries which result as a long-term consequence of the hightened radiation levels.
My citations were for all forseeable fatalities for the next 5 billion years according to the bogus linear-no-threshold theory of radiation cancer-causing potential (which claims people can get cancer from any amount of radiation, no matter how low, and so therefore any radiation release will negatively affect people for eternity -- this theory, called the LNT, has been proven false of course).
Deaths and injuries which are a direct and immediate result of a meltdown would be limited to cases of acute radiation poisoning, a rare disease. According to the same source, "there would be no detectable deaths in 98 out of 100 meltdowns, there would be over 100 such deaths in one out of 500 meltdowns, over 1,000 in one out of 5,000 meltdowns, and in 1 out of 100,000 meltdowns there would be about 3,500 fatalities.
"The largest number of detectable fatalities to date from an energy-related incident was an air-pollution episode in London in 1952 in which 3,500 deaths directly attributable to the pollution occured within a few days. Thus, with regard to detectable fatalities, the equivalent of the worst nuclear accident considered in the RSS -- expected once in 100,000 meltdowns -- has already occured with coal burning."
Source: Bernard L. Cohen's The nuclear energy option: an alternative for the 90s; chapter 6, The Fearsome Reactor Meltdown Accident
-pjf
What we're talking about is something less threatening that burning a few million tons of coal a month, generating quantities of carbon dioxide and other gases that boggle the mind and blowing a great big hole through our ozone layer.
The concept of energy creation through the use of tital or wave forces seems to me to be excellent. My scepticism comes from the fact that I don't believe we're going to make much of a dent in the energy requirements as these are driven by industry, and most alternative forms of energy can barely power a small village. That aside, I find it cringeworthy that allegedly intelligent people spit on an idea like this by running around in circles worrying about the environmental consequences, when they're negligible in contrast to almost every other method of energy creation we have to choose from.
There are a number of variables in this equation, and the amount of energy that we are going to need to keep the population happy is flexible in one direction only : upwards. Everything else gets dragged up with it - tons of Co2 generated, cubic metres of spent fissile material under supervision, diameter of the ozone hole(s).
Okay - you're right, we're once again affecting the distribution of energy, kinetic, potential, tidal, electrical. Well done, you've explained something, but in the context of what our alternatives are, and in terms of what you'd rather we did, what on earth (whilst we still have one) is your point?
Sorry - just re-read it and it's a bit harsh - I'm just getting really tired of all the experts in the world who are great at shooting other people's ideas down and couldn't come up with a better solution given from now until the first horseman comes calling.
Salocin.com
I really don't think you can transfer electricity very far without losing a lot of it. That much wire just builds up in resistance too quickly even with those big fat wires they hang.
This probably belonged in my initial post, but don't forget all the talk of "moving coastlines" that the global warming people keep harping about. If the ocean level moves, what happens to the power? Flooded or dried up. Either way, not very stable.
I think the whole harness the ocean thing is cool, but not very practical for powering the planet. Maybe little pieces of it.
--- Don't be a player hater: I meta-mod ALL negative mods as Unfair.
Uranium reserves that are cost-effective to mine will be enough to supply for around forty years.
These are known reserves. Historically, known reserves are unrealistically low estimates of true cost-effective reserves since mining companies are loathe to spend money on costly exploration beyond what is necessary to establish proof of enough capacity for the next few decades. The 1978 known reserves of oil ran out in the 80's. We now have twice those known reserves.
Also, these are conventional reserves. The nuclear energy in the fissionable material (uranium, thorium and plutonium) present as impurities in the coal that's burned every year in the U.S. is greater than the combustible energy of the coal. This is an unconventional uranium reserve. The uranium (and thorium and plutonium) in the captured fly ash could be easily extracted using known technologies and used to power nuke plants. Better yet, the coal plants could be decommissioned and the coal mined strictly for its uranium/thorium/plutonium content.
Other unconventional sources are granite and seawater.
Operating your own power plant is extremely dangerous and is wasteful of resources since excess capacity must be on hand to deal with the fact that your usage could vary wildly compared to the more moderate variation in usage by a group of hundreds, thousands, or millions of energy customers.
The problem with this system is that it has to be put in locations with strong wave action. Generally, those are places where there is a lot of wild life, not to mention surfers. The picture doesn't exactly make it look attractive & I wouldn't want one in my back yard. I think the NIMBY (not in my backyard) folks will kill this, if the oil giants won't.
On the other hand, the potential of placing these types of turbines in the ocean not near the shoreline is very tempting. Creating an off-shore variant, especially one that is entirely under water, reduces the impact on the ecology, and the view.
The other alternative is to replace harbor walls or water-breaks with these generators. If you do that for commercial harbors, you will get the benefit, without the cost.
Overall, this is a great idea. Although it was originally invented in the 1970's, so it's an old idea. It's just been implemented for the first time.
Thalia
CoolAss:
...for those of you who are planning on saying "But fusion doesn't work!!" We reached break-even in 1983, and can acheive temperatures of over 150 million C. When we hit around 180m C, we will have a sustainable reaction which will basically solve the worlds energy problems.
Yes, you can build breeder reactors which use depleted uranium to run the plant, and this would give us nearly 1000 years of electricity...
As the efficiency of fuel usage goes up, as in the case of breeder reactors, the cost per unit of energy produced goes down proportionately. Therefore you can tap reserves that were previously considered uneconomic -- such as seawater which would provide far more than 5 billion years of energy, if only the earth would last that long.
but there is one problem, the waste from a breeder reactor is WEAPONS GRADE PLUTONIUM.
There are many ways of obtaining nuclear weapons materials. Refining spent fuel from breeder reactors is one of the more difficult. Therefore, weapons proliferation caused by breeder reactors is a non-issue.
There is a difference between a sustainable rection and a workable power-plant. There is a difference between a workable power-plant and a constructable power-plant. There is a difference between a constructable power-plant and an economically constructable power-plant.
And since when did the world have energy problems?
corvi42:
Please illustrate the various worker accidents that might occur with wave-generated electricity
Wave-generation plants, like windmills, would likely have massive maintenance requirements. Perhaps they would be much higher since seawater is highly corrosive. Maintenance of heavy machinery is some of the most dangerous employment the modern world offers. And there would be lots of this employment since wave energy, being a form of solar energy, is extremely diffuse compared to nuclear energy.
corvi42:
If it takes 10,000 years for some material to become nontoxic, how can anyone possibly guarantee it will remain safely contained for that long?
After 500 years, high level nuclear waste is less radioactive than the ore it was mined from.
There are no guarantees it will remain safely contained for any amount of time. Requiring that the by-far single safest energy technology ever invented be the only energy technology to be held to a standard of absolute safety will lead to the heavy use of rather unsafe energy technologies such as solar and to a much greater extent the hyper-deadly coal when it turns out time and time again that solar can't meet our needs.
Er... Sorry to intrude, but this concept uses ocean waves, which are formed by wind blowing on water, and have nothing to do with the moon, which causes tides.
The other consideration is that they estimated 0.1% of the energy would be needed to power 5 times more than we use currently (no pun intended). That means that _IF_ this is our only source of energy (which it won't be), we would be using such a small percentage of the energy that it the impact may be virtually impercievable.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
what about a volcanic based steam turbine?
Lava is hot because it is heated by decaying uranium and thorium. And radioactive potassium; forgot that one.
http://rglsun1.geol.vt.edu/seus.html/a& gt;
When all the oil runs out in 50 years, we should just turn all the offshore platforms into wave generators.
A tide-driven generator is fundamentally different. It's interesting to consider using the energy stored in the earth's rotation. You can extract a lot of energy before, say, adding a second to a decade (try the calculation some time). I'll leave that environmental impact discussion up to the replies here.
One way to do this is to use the Earth's oceans as a large cam to pump something (floating on top) up and down---that's a tidal generator.
Actually if the moon crashed into the earth I think we would only have to worry about ONE wave, and that would be the least of my worries at that point.
What's your source for wind farms altering weather patterns? I have never heard of such a thing, and I worked for many years in the wind energy industry.
Live to Learn
Learn to Lie
Live to Learn
Learn to Lie
Lie to Live
Man, I saw this headline and thought "Wave Driven Generators... I'd need a tidal harness and, what, Photon/Wave Mechanics?" Ugh. Alpha Centauri is too addictive.
"Think I'll take some crack to slow down."
-- P.J. O'Rourke
"Blow up your TV/Throw away your paper/
Move to the country/Build you a home"
io hymen hymnaee io
io hymen hymnaee
The thing is - I've actually *been there* - I've stood on top of this thing. In answer to your particular query there is *VERY* little impact of any kind on the surrounding country (Islay is where some of my family lives and is one of the best paradises left in this country (Scotland)) the only thing you notice is a very small block of concrete nestled between the rocks and a whole shit load of noise, I went to see the new Wavegen site (there is a pre-existing one which was a test bed) in a storm and it's LOUD *;) Why not go see for your self? You wouldn't mind a few of them around if you had seen one. Oh Yes, and I know I wasn't supposed to climb on top. Sorry. PD.
How would something like this affect the enviroment? I'm sure it's a lot nicer then fossil fuels and nuclear waster, but what about animal habitats? How much beach space would be required to make this feasible? Where would you even put these generators? Certinly not on my beach!
There's one in France which predates the Bay of Fundy by some 18 years, and produce 240Mw versus ~20Mw from the Fundy plant.
Does this include toilet waves? My toilet overflows a lot, so perhaps I could hook up my personal computer to my toilet? I think Sisco should get right on this.
~ Yes, that's my real name.
Sometimes I feel guilty about the amount of juice I use up with my LAN at home, especially since the computers outnumber the people in my house by a ratio of 3:1.
But, if I'm getting my electricity from something like this (ie, 100% renewable and very abundant), then maybe that annoying voice in my mind will BACK THE HELL OFF and let me sleep better.
SirPoopsalot
PS: first *real* post?
Due to strong American commercialistic competition this will not happen. The gasoline companies don't want electric cars, the fuel companies won't want hydro electric wave generators running the show. Their pockets are more important than the enviroment.
pose no such risk
...Storms are growing more intense, more frequent. And --Surprise, surprise -- it has something to do with all that buying. As a standard rule of thumb, spending a dollar in our economy uses about a liter of oil. for manufacturing, shipping advertising, running whatever item you've purchased. Not every purchase is equal, obviously. Buying a used bike at a garage sale is different from buying a Ford Exploiter. But as a rule of thumb it works. If you spend, you heat: Hurricanes ' R' Us. Ask yourself these two questions if you want to understand the physical constraints we face: could the six billion people now inhabiting the Earth (soon to be ten billion) all consume like middle-class Americans without overwhelming the planet? If we keep consuming in such a fashion, will they want to try?"
The cost line - say the 100 meters centered where water meets land - is a very important natural space. As you mentioned Dams can block spawning runs ect, but this plan also has a very negative effect of destroying that coast line which seabirds, turtles, rodents, mammals ect ect use. The waters edge is used by many animals - the habitat lost if you lined the coasts with this type of generator would be immense. Animals need a variety of different spaces - and removing coast lines destroys a vital, independant, specific habitat.
I would be very much in favour of renewable, clean sources of energy being developed - this I feel is a very exciting opportunity and technology BUT what really has to be addressed is the flagrant overconsumption in NorthAmerica. We can increase the amount of power 'till the cows come home' and create it in many clean/viable ways, but when you analyze the issue this does not address the root problem it simply masks it.
Taken from this months Adbuster magazine:
Later it continues:
"...before he went off to Rio de Janeiro for the 1992 Earth Summit, George Bush the Elder said that while he was willing to talk about the environment, "the American way of life is not negotiable." His successor, Bill Clinton, remarked famously that "it's the economy, stupid." Everything we see around us reinforces that message of inevitability: cars get larger each year, and homes too"
This is a root issue to be concerned with.
This would be great for people near a shoreline with good enough wave action to get it going, but transporting the electricity from the coast, to say, Nebraska wouldn't be very cost effective. Even if you were on the coast, I wonder how many of the coasts near major population centers have enough wave action to make this worthwhile. It would be cool if it really is "low cost" and available though.
--- Don't be a player hater: I meta-mod ALL negative mods as Unfair.
Perhaps a similar generator could be attached to your waterbed, so when you and your S.O. are ****ing, the lights stay on.
Oh, yeah. You don't want the lights on. So much for that idea.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Indeed. The Bay of Fundy (yes, you nailed the spelling), which lies between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick (near Maine, for the Canadian geographically-challenged) is home to the highest tides in the world. Some 100 billion tons of water is pumped in and out of the Bay twice a day, every day. It is also the home of the only tidal energy plant in the Western hemisphere.
The Bay of Fundy does produce energy at the Annapolis Royal energy plant, but it only amounts to about 18-20 gigawatts, which equals out to about 1% of Nova Scotia's entire energy use. (Not a lot, in other words.) At last check, it is believed that some 3000 gigawatts of electricity could be produced worldwide through tidal power.
The main problem with tidal power though is that it requires a great difference between high and low tides, at least a 5 m difference. (The Bay of Fundy's high/low tide difference is 17 m.) There aren't too many places around the world with those kinds of tides. Plus, there's the downside that the energy can only be gathered every 12 hours because of the tides.
On the other hand, there are tons of places with waves. Hell, most of the planet is covered with water, so that makes for a lot of beaches. From what I've read, the technology is rather different from the tidal energy used at the Bay. (But then again, IANA hydroelectric expert.)
Since I'm a Nova Scotian, for some reason I know this stuff. Damn Nova Scotian Bay of Fundy propaganda.
J
allanj:
What options could you possibly refer to that would reliably last the 10000+ years it takes for most of the radiation to die out?
The reason there are a number of safe options for the safe disposal of nuclear waste is that the health hazards of nuclear waste are trivial -- a point agreed upon by all peer-reviewed scientific studies on the subject. The dose makes the poison and the poison, in this case, is surprisingly easy to keep the public form getting no more than minimal doses of. After converting the waste to something highly insoluble like glass or ceramic, some ultra-safe disposal options are:
Drop it into the ocean at random locations.
Bury it beneath the ocean floor.
Bury it in a salt mine.
Bury it in a place that isn't a salt mine.
Bury it in a highly engineered 30 gigadollar repository like Yucca mountain.
Use it as landfill.
Use it as construction material. (This is practically already done, as granite is loaded with naturally occuring uranium and many buildings are already made of granite -- yes, they make geiger counters go crazy and, no, they aren't harming the people inside.)
Bury it in shallow trenches.
Dump it directly into rivers.
The list goes on and on...
All construction pollutes and because solar power is so diffuse, the construction of it's collectors pollutes significantly. There is the waste at the construction sites and waste at the factories where the construction materials are made.
Specifically with solar panels, there is the coal burned to make the panels (3% of the lifetime energy output of a solar panel is burned as coal) and, more seriously (serious enough to make solar a serious threat to the survivability of humanity), cadmium sulfide. This is not the limit of toxic waste from solar. Also, incidentally, the coal burned in solar panel construction is the reason solar PV plants release more radiation than nuclear power plants -- coal contains radioactive elements such as Pottasium 40, Thorium 232, Uranium, and Plutonium.
Visual pollution: All solar energy is diffuse energy and so its many collectors create much visual pollution.
With wind, noise pollution: Complaints of noise pollution from wind turbines are significant. Wind energy is diffuse and so the many collectors needed to concentrate it produce much noise pollution.
Hey Dude, There's nothing to get so concerned about - I was on Islay when the Hurricane hit on Christmas 1998, I saw the waves (from more than 2 miles away) and there's no shortage - know what I'm saying? Islay is stuck out there between Scotland and the US - there's more than enough waves to go around. PD.
It sounds like a small amount of the total - but lets stop and think for a moment. The oceans are HUGE - more than 70% of the worlds surface area. If the statement here is correct and it means that 0.1% of the total energy within the oceans, we're talking about constructing powerplants over 360,796.8 square kilometers of oceans ( earth's surface: 509,600,000 km2. ocean's surface: 70.8% = 360,796,800 km2. 0.1% of which = 360,796.8 km2 )
Perhaps this was a misquoted statistic. Maybe they meant 0.1% of the earth's coastlines - which comes to a suprisingly small figure of only 312 km. Although the statement is vague - do the include the complete volume of the oceans? That would be huge - and how would one trap deep-sea knetic energy?
N.B. My statistics come from articles on britannica.com
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Damming the Strait of Gibralter might annoy the large volume of shipping that passes through that gap every day :-)
You forgot to add that it will never become chaper than traditional power unless omone starts buying it now. Any technology needs its early adopters to get off the ground. Look at HDTV, is it worth paying $10000 for a new TV? A few people might say yes, and this drives the price down as more competition pops up and economies of scale drive the price down. Same for power technology, Wind power started in the 1970's as a potential power technology, but it was damn expensive, like 30-40 cents a kWh, while conventional coal power was on the order of 3-6 cents a kWh. Some people though the technology was good, and they bought it anyways. Now Wind power is about the same cost as coal power, maybe a little more expensive, and adoption of wind is starting to take off. Wind power installations have grown about 30% a year for the last couple of years and even more as prices come down further. My point is that the fact a commercial installation of wave power has finally become a reality is a big boost for the technology. Even if its more expensive now, the very fact that people are buying into it is a good sign. If enough do, eventually the price will come down, after all, waves are free, coal and oil are not. At the point that wave energy becomes cheaper to install than a new coal power plant, the technology will take of. It may take 20 years to get things ramped up, but it will happen.
Somehow I don't think that too many surfers are going to protest building these things on Scottish islands - the north atlantic has a tendency to cause even the most manly surfers to "shrink" ... brrr
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Ouch - thats http://www.adbusters.org
Apologies all...
Hmm, you went to all the trouble and spelled leech wrong. *Sigh*
-1 foot/year vs 3 cm/year ;-)
Well, NASA never figured out those SIImperial conversions either
All opinions are my own - until criticized
The BEST estimates for uranium deposits leave us with LESS THAN 50 YEARS OF IT LEFT.
Yes, you can build breeder reactors which use depleted uranium to run the plant, and this would give us nearly 1000 years of electricity... but there is one problem, the waste from a breeder reactor is WEAPONS GRADE PLUTONIUM.
So, I think we can all agree on this one, breeder reactors are a pretty stupid solution.
The only good form of nuclear energy is FUSION!!!! Fusion could give us NON-POLLUTING energy for about... um... ever. Using sea water we could extract Deuterium which is the main incredient for fusion (and tritium).
Anyway... you're a moron for thinking Nuclear Fission is sustainable, because:
1.) It's not. 50 years max.
2.) Breeder reactors are NOT an option.
Who ever told you it was sustainable for 5 billion years is an ignorant fool, or works for GE. (Or both.) You obviously have no real knowledge about this subject, and like to spout off facts hoping nobody will know enough to reply.
Oh, yeah, and for those of you who are planning on saying "But fusion doesn't work!!" We reached break-even in 1983, and can acheive temperatures of over 150 million C. When we hit around 180m C, we will have a sustainable reaction which will basically solve the worlds energy problems.
It will be SO cheap that it would cost the power company more to send you a bill then to simply not charge you at all.
that's Sisko
Yes, exactly. The impact may be small indeed, but it is folly to assume that changing the amount of energy available to an environment will have _no_ effect (change => no change?). For example, the weathering of shorelines may provide minerals that are consumed by the plants and animals in the area. The wave action also helps distribute nutrients, and makes sites more or less habitable by different organisims.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
We are going to run out of coal. And oil too. Fossil fuels are a limited resource which could well run out IN THE 21ST CENTURY.
We need to start looking at alternative power sources NOW, not waiting until we run out.
That's even before we get to fucking up the climate with fossil fuel emissions...
More funding to Nuclear Fusion!
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"
--
Find free books.
Please illustrate the various worker accidents that might occur with wave-generated electricity? Are you thinking of people being swept away into the sea? I fail to see the incredible dangers you speak of.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Your post, which could be summarized succinctly as "Duh, stick a flywheel on the earth (wipe drool away)," would not qualify.
It would if Jeff Bezos presented it.. As has been proven by '1-click'... Ideas (with a little smidgen of code for proof-of-concept) are patentable now..
Didn't say I liked it..
Your Working Boy,
Here is a Amazon.com link
What if we run out of coal?
That seems backwards to me. Removing kinetic energy from the ocean would lessen such effects, I would think. (Am I missing something basic here?)
It would lessen or almost eliminate erosion at the area where the waves _would have_ hit. That's gotta be good for people living there, right?
I think the only people who would bitch about this are the surfers, dude. Total bummer.
Plus if the figure quoted is acurate, 0.1% of the ocean's kinetic energy being able to power the planet - that's a pretty small amount of the total. Plus we already alter our weather in weird ways just by building cities (take a meteorology class - it's an eye-opener!).
I say go for it. It's gotta be better to be powered by that than by what we are now. Take that, windmills, biomass power plants, geothermal, and solar, and it's very technically feasible to power the whole planet without anywhere near the amount of pollution we currently produce. It's just that it's so much cheaper to do it the dirty way. *sigh*
Hmm, well, if that weren't there, then that energy would be used up in the resultant "crash" (visual and audible) that would happen against the wall there. I'm not necessairly thinkin gall that hard, but I cna't think of anything that will really miss the crash in one spot - not to disagree that there isn't something. Just that, the energy isn't going to be sucked up, it was going away anyway.- -----------
feel free to point out errors in my thinking.
--------------------------------------
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
The power grid may work fairly efficiently at the moment, but that is because (I imagine) there are a number of different generation points spread reasonably evenly across the grid, and so there is no large bulk flow of current long distance across the grid. Put all the generators in one area and all the consumers in another and you'll have much more current flowing long distances, and more heat related losses as a result.
The actual situation would not be quite that extreme as you point out because much of the high power consuming areas are near the costs. If places further away can have their part of the grid bolstered by other sources (solar, wind etc.) meaning less long distance current flow needed to supply them, then the sytem could well be workable. An efficient electricity storage system would be the real bonus for these potentially erratic sources of power.
In case nobody has patented the fly-wheel idea, keep a copy of this post as evidence of prior art, along with my opinion that the idea is too obvious to merit patent protection.
"Obtuse Anger is that which is greater than Right Anger" - Lewis Carroll
I think this is somewhat like a wind powered device dont think theres to much of a prob with eco unfriendly stuff and its a renewable power source so i think only thing needed to be worried about is fish getting sucked into the turbine or something silly like that.
This one is actually on the local grid, contributing power. This is a really neat concept -- really, really "direct current!"
"Irrelevant since it takes up so little space and can be rendered immobile."
Given the length of time many of these materials remain toxic, you cannot guarantee that they will truly remain immobile. If it takes 10,000 years for some material to become nontoxic, how can anyone possibly guarantee it will remain safely contained for that long? Given that numerous civilizations can rise and fall in that amount of time, and even the continents and shape of the earth may change.
Please don't promise things like this - nobody can ever deliver upon it.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
I personally know of deaths extending from the Chernobyl disaster affecting people as far away as the Island of Crete - and sickness in both humans and livestock also. When livestock and crops die or are made sick/damaged, it adversely affects the economy - which will naturally lead to an increase in poverty, malnutrition, etc. All of which dramatically increase the number of dead and sick far above the immediate results of the accident. I'm afraid the figures you're citing here just don't calculate these factors, and cannot be a true representation of the results of a nuclear accident.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
If you take away the waves, what evidence do we have that the moon isn't just a massless circle hanging in the sky?
I agree with this statement when batteries are used to store the power - as there are no reasonably cheap and safe battery systems available. But given that batteries are not used - where does the pollution come from??
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
for vast lengths of time [nuclear waste] remains quite toxic for longer than the current age of literate civilization.
Irrelevant since it takes up so little space and can be rendered immobile.
They still haven't figured out what to do with the waste material generated from Diablo
It is, and was at the time, well known that there were and are a number of safe options for the disposal of nuclear waste. New and better ones are constantly being developed.
the heat pollution from the plant has demonstrably (and, as a recent decision and fine shows, illegally) altered the ecology of the nearby cove.
All steam-turbine power plants require steam condensers that pollute thermally. Sorry about that.
Less dangerous?....>
Significantly. The danger for workers of a power source is roughly a function of the density of its fuel. You have to consider the routine deaths that occur daily with all forms of power production, not just consider the big accidents. Nuclear fission has, by far, the highest power density fuel and therefore the fewest injuries and deaths.
what would happen to the agriculture and habitability of SLO county if Diablo pulled a Chernobyl?
What would happen is something that wouldn't be significant because it would happen so rarely. Factor in worst-case-scenarios for nuclear and you still get less injury and death. Chernobyl was and is an unsafe reactor design. Diablo is a safe reactor design.
Costs less? PG&E is taking a loss on Diablo Canyon.
Diablo cost too much to build. A number of factors led to this. For cheaper reactors: Safety requirements need to be standardized and reactors need to be preapproved and built faster without fear of hearings and lawsuits after construction starts which can add costly delays. Since the early eighties, France used mass-produced, standardized designs. This is the safest and cheapest way to build nuclear fission plants and this is what needs to be done all over the world.
As far as I'm concerned, nuclear fission can stay sustainable and reliable "on paper" until we can fix its substantial real-world problems.
France has fixed nuclear's substantial real-world problems. The reason France was able to do this was largely because France has a political system that allowed the energy sector to bulldoze over the political opposition (which was substantial and roughly equivalent per capita to the opposition in the United States), and less so because of plain dumb luck in picking the winning formula (standardization and mass production).
While standardization and mass-production might seem obviously more efficient, it wasn't so obvious in the 70's when new technologies were coming out every week. Every utility wanted a custom power plant that would take advantage of the very latest tech. The latest tech is something you can't have with standardized designs. The second seduction was efficiency through massiveness. Contractors were continuously ratcheting up plant size by seducing utilities with higher-wattage plants that would cost just a little more. More gigawatts per buck = cost savings down the line. Unfortunately larger plants = larger loans. Add a few interest rate hikes and construction delays and you have a financial disaster.
In other words, you have Diablo. A model sustainable power plant, but way too pricey.
Building a passageway for ships would be the easy part. The effect of reduced circulation on the environment would be worse.
This - and other concerns raised here about the environmental impact, &c - would make interesting additional reading. I recall that in the UK, for many years, government refused to fund anything more than token research into sustainable power generation (wind, waves); and justified their decision by using a cost model so skewed towards coal & gas, as to suggest wave & water would never be viable. But then, electrical power and the UK is weird: we must be the only country where the hourly price paid to the generating companies for their supply is set at the highest bid made to supply for that hour, rather than the lowest. You have to love accountants.
Isn't the use of wind turbines very functional to compensate for the differences between high & low tide?
Or am I totally thinking in the wrong direction here?
Ilja
It would seem to me a HUGE amount of energy is wasted simply in the compression and decompression of the air.
I would guess a hydraulic turbine would make more sense (oil separated from the seawater if you are worried about corrosion)
Pneumatics are terribly inefficient, their main advantage is they are cleaner than hydraulics which get really messy.
The effect will mainly be "ugly noisy pieces of concrete using up some space". Just like any other manmade structure. A coastal city is worse.
There is no ill effect from using kinetic energy from the sea (not on the sea itself, not on the moon orbit) because this energy is used up today too! It is not as if wave energy is preserved today, it is used up as waves hit the beach, creating sound, deforming the beach, heathing the water slightly.
All 3 of the products they have listed are marketed as an effective breakwater type device. In fact the Osprey description says that it would help make a self-financing solution for harbors.
Brian Macy
Homes getting bigger is actually a good thing. Soon, within the next few decades, very efficient, environmentally-friendly cars will be available. So, you don't need to worry so much about people having to travel further due to sprawl. Now, if you lower the population density, you have ultimately less expenditure of energy. What produces more energy? 10sq miles with 10,000 people, or 10sq miles with 10 people? :)
Thought so.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Sure it looks nice on paper but that energy isn't created from nothing.
You're absolutely right. Most major energy sources available to man are derived from the accumulation of solar energy on our planet--fossil fuels, wind power, wave power, hydro power, and a number of others. (the only exceptions I can think of off the top of my head are geothermal, tidal, and nuclear power; feel free to add/change if you think of others.)
I take issue with the notion that energy isn't free, however. Quite the contrary--energy is perfectly free. How much does it cost you to use the sun to warm your body? How much does it cost you to sail a boat? How much does it cost a plant to perform photosynthesis? Energy is perfectly free; it's our methods of extracting and using that energy that cost money. Thus, if we can come up with a method that's cheap and easy to implement, inexpensive to maintain, and able to generate large amounts of power, we can have energy so cheap that it's virtually free for the home user. The Wavegen technology looks like it would be a perfect solution for small costal communitites, and once this technology is further refined, it could provide energy on a much greater scale.
I'm far from a tree hugger
We can see that,
but when I see alternative energy sources mentioned, I never see any discussion of the impact. It's as if people think that anything that doesn't burn fossil fuels is automatically eco-friendly.
Well, I'd argue that comparatively, there are precious few methods less eco-friendly than burning fossil fuels. If you're inferring, as I think you are, that the Wavegen people feel that their solution is flawless, I'd argue that while it isn't flawless, I can't think of many ways of generating this amount of power in a more environmentally friendly manner.
Judging by the images on the Wavegen site, it would appear that one of their LIMPET units takes up maybe 50-100 feet of shoreline. Considering that I've seen costal floodwalls running the entire length of a city before, I cannot help but consider this to be quite an ecologically sound method for energy production. In addition, the LIMPET modules can be designed to be part of a city's costal floodwall, thus doubling it's utility as generator and protective barrier. The LIMPET could also be used in this method to build artificial harbors (which are built today using concrete or stone walls and jettys.)
If costal space isn't available or is too ecologically valuable to be disturbed, the Wavegen OSPREY units are designed to operate up to one kilometer out to sea (in up to 15 meters of water) and can generate four times the energy as the LIMPET, causing virtually no environmental impact whatsoever.
The LIMPET units are analogous to costal development and floodwalls. Yes, too much costal development will endanger the health of the costal ecosystem, but it is perfectly possible for humans and costal ecology to co-exist. What's more, costal structures such as floodwalls and harbor walls already exist and serve an absolutely vital function for costal communities. Why not double up your investment and get ultra-inexpensive power at the same time?
Make no mistake, there are indeed environmental factors to consider when building a system such as a LIMPET generator. To question the eco-friendliness of such a system in the face of traditional combustion-based fossil fuel power plants, however, is laughable. The ocean contains vast amounts of power that basically end up going entirely to waste; it would be nice to utilize some of it instead of clogging our atmosphere with more human-released smoke, sulfur and carbon dioxide.
10 PRINT "This is a"
20 PRINT "Haiku program."
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Looking at the design, it looks like you could integrate this into a natural coastline with a minimum of disruption.
As for the way middle class Americans live, if energy costs went up, they'd live differently. That's the beauty of economics. Lobby for higher taxes on fossil fuels, or carbon credit schemes for power plants. That'll do much better than lecturing everybody on what a wasteful slob they are.
If you must lecture, do it in the form of example.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Your concern is that removing kinetic energy from the waves will cause unwanted harm.
Can't happen.
As a wave hits the coastline, it starts to break up. Eventually, it spills over itself and the wave ends. This is the point of zero remaining kinetic energy, and the point of maximum potential energy. The wave retreats, as always.
From what I can tell, this technology uses both kinetic and potential energies to generate electricity. However, it doesn't remove any more energy than the wave would remove on its own. There is absolutely no way that the climate would be harmed by having a man-made structure remove the same kinetic and potential energy from a wave, that it would lose without man's help.
the bottom line is that alternative fuel will not be used to its potential until it becomes cheaper than traditional power. So, as long as fossil fuels are easier and cheaper to use, one might as well give up their hopes of a renewable earth. money money money money money...
This particular generator design requires a shoreline installation (also one that faces the incoming swells). The environmental impact is the shore station itself. Better designs can be placed off shore. These huge towers capture the ocean currents for energy. As for the kenetic energy of the oceans, we don't have much to worry about here: you'd have to burn the entire world supply of oil every day for about a century to match the kenetic energy of the worlds ocean exerted in a single day.
Someone you trust is one of us.
I like this kind of technology because it seems to be taking advantage of apparently perpetual motion. Of course the oceans aren't literally in perpetual motion, but it's as close as we come.
A little correction actually. The moon is headed to Earth, not distant space. Some simple laser-aided telemetry shows that the Moon is approaching us at about 1 foot per year. Nothing to be worried about for the next few billion years.
So really, tidal forces will increase over time, but not measurably in any way. Oh, just to add, tides and waves work by gravity. The only way to affect them would be to actually blow away a significant portion of the Moon into distant space, where gravity wouldn't affect us. THEN we'd see tides weaken.
For the most part humans define environmental damage as environmental change. This could lead to a big environmental change.
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
If we decrease the kinetic energy of the moon, then the moon would crash into the Earth, not drift away. This would tend to make the tidal effects greater due to the closer proximity of the Moon to the planet. But the fundamental argument you make is correct. If we tap energy from the Moon's tidal effects, then the moon would be doing work with its gravitational field [without getting into the details of who is doing work on whom], and the system would inherently would have to lose gravitational potential. I believe however, the primary source of energy for this type of power would be the much more frequent periodic forces of normal weather-based waves. Tidal forces are generally slow, and would therefore probably require very large arrays of these generators to make a significant amount of power. Regular weather pattern waves though, are far more frequent and rapid.
For a more intuitive way of thinking of this, obviously bringing up/down the water in the column once a day is far less energy than bringing it up and down thousands of times in a day. There are more issues (most generators generate more power with greater speed, etc), but the frequency is what it all boils down to.
You're thinking of the "Salter Duck", developed by Steven Salter in the 1970s and which generates electricity when spinning as it bobs up and down in the waves. Yes, it's possible (and perhaps preferable), but unfortunately, it was killed during the 1980s when its cost was overcalculated and the project was shelved. As OWCs become in vogue again, we may see the Duck reemerge from the fires of bureaucracy like a phoenix.
we all know that the good waves are ridden by surfers and they are going to be real mad about a huge electricity plant being build on there waves... i can see a real big rumble coming...
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
What you need to realise is that Islay (pronounces Eye-lah, not Is-lay, Eye-lay or any other horrific mutation that newscasters seem to perpetrate) is fairly remote. Something like a 2.5-hour ferry journey from the west coast of Scotland, and the ferry port is a good hour-and-a-half drive from anywhere.
So electricity is currently generated by a oil-fired power station somewhere central (near Bowmore iirc). A couple of these 500kW wave generators would power pretty much the whole island.
you can rearrange the letters in "waver driven generator" to spell "andover wage inverter" - There's definitely something fishy going on here and I'm going to get to the bottom of it.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Have you ever _been_ to the west coast of Scotland? I can assure you that there'll be _plenty_ of wave energy left even if lots (pick a large number) of these were built.... All it's doing is taking energy that would cause some [erosion, turbulence, noise, whatever] and all end up as heat anyway; and extracting that as electricity. However, there will be loss of wildlife habitat, pollution from debris and concrete (very nasty stuff in water) during construction... to be taken into consideration to decide if this is worthwhile.
So we can now harness the raw power of sporting events?(Save the planet, do the wave!) Great! Or the Queen Mum and her littleratcheting wrist action... The Pope! Think of the energy we ocould get form the Pope! never mind all the flag waving done here in the US during this last election... So much wasted energy...
http://radio.weblogs.com/0103443/
You're right in one instance. The Bay of Fundy plant produces 18-20 megawatts, not gigawatts, my mistake. But the figure on worldwide tidal power is correct, 3000 gigawatts. However, after various constraints and physical mumbo jumbo, only 60 gigawatts can actually be used for something useful.
Some interesting links I found while checking my figures:
http://www.iclei.org/efacts/tidal.htm
http://www.valleyweb.com/fundytides/ It's been a while I guess since I've read the propaganda. We used to get this stuff all the time in school. I went to Annapolis Royal a few times, too, and it's all they can talk about.
J
Just a theory.
Thats a joke right? If its not, I wont even bother to comment on how beyond reason your statment is...
What is this: "Thought so."? Are you in gradeschool?
Don't believe it... the moon moves away every time a car hits a skunk and moves closer each time Victoria Secrets puts out a new catalog.
Brian Macy
Will it's this or nuclear, or coal, or you can shutdown the computer you've been typing on and turn off all the lights, if you're that worried about us taking .1% of the energy generated by the ocean...uh oh maybe we'll slow down the planets rotation..ah! run for the hills
Folks, this is not totally renewable. Granted, this is probably far fetched, but the principle of conservation of energy does apply. Has anyone done any research into the affect of the depletion of wave energy on the world ecosystem. Could installing these systems ruin it for surfers everywhere? --sam
One of the ways that solar energy can win is by reducing the cost of transmission of power by generating the power at (or at least very near to) the point of consumption.
As far as photovoltaic solar goes, the theoretical limit is around 28% conversion (IIRC) and pushing the cells to ward that point is at an every increasing cost of the materials. I recall a technology (UNSW researched IIRC) that created relatively inefficient cells (8 - 13 % or something) but with materials cost 1/1000th of the more efficent cells. So cheap as to warrant one in every roof tile. Now that would be a fine thing. Does anyone recall this (over 5 years ago).
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Sure, if the plants themselves didn't have to be decommissioned after a comparatively short time. What is the average lifetime of a power plant? 10 years, 15 years, before constant bombardment with radioactive particles weakens the atomic structure of the building materials so much that the place has to be condemned?
As efficient as nuclear power is to produce, can someone quote a recommended plant lifetime, along with cost of a plant versus energy output during the plant's lifetime?
Crazy Europeans, eh? (Well, we may be crazy, but you Americans are just plain stupid).
Anyway, do you know what you are talking about? Electrical current is AC because those generators usually _spin_ (this wave thingy is probably no exception), and doing that, they happen to produce current in sine wave pattern - AC current -... any technology isn't perfect, so rectifying that current would lead to performance loss, _THAT_ would be crazy. And there is another good reason to use AC, transformers don't work on DC current.
Yes, it's possible (and perhaps preferable), but unfortunately, it was killed during the 1980s when its cost was overcalculated and the project was shelved.
The cost was overcalculated by people who were on the side of the oil companies and presented to the government, no its not a conspiracy theory, it was well documented, so well in fact that it was the subject of a BBC TV documentary over here in the UK back in the 90s, and those responible got away scot free.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Offshore stations do have an impact on the shoreline "behind" them. You would not want to put too many of them off one stretch of environmentally sensitive coastline. Still, there's lots of coastline, much of it already developed.
Wow, choral reefs? Are those the mythical singing isles we hear so little about these days?
Good point. Too bad it was the same point I made. Here it is again for your dancing and dining pleasure:
And I wasn't talking about wave disasters. The daily risks of jobs involved with the routine upkeep of wave generators is where much of the injury and death comes from. Low density power source = massive employment needed for upkeep = massive injury and death.
From Bernard L. Cohen's The nuclear energy option: an alternative for the 90's:
I imagine this would be best used in areas that aren't right next to the main power net, like islands. For instance, I bet Sea Haven would just love this. Depending on how much it costs, it might also be good as a quick-n-dirty power plant in 3rd world countries, where 400kW will get you pretty far.
--
Dyolf Knip
I can just imagine Ney York harbor without all of the chop, because these things absorb the wave energy. Would be really cool, and save a couple bucks of the city energy bill.
On the other hand, the potential of placing these types of turbines in the ocean not near the shoreline is very tempting.
No it isn't. By "these types of turbines", you must mean the turbines in question: Wells turbines. They're oscillating water columns, and they require large waves in order to function. You don't find large waves out at sea. In fact, you need rocky shorelines (not just shorelines) to get OWCs functioning, because of the wave amplitudes required (i.e. hooray for Scotland, but California will have to explore other methods).
What's more, you have to run cabling to shore in order to transport the electricity once generated. That introduces a second limitation on the use of OWCs at distant sea, as though their complete abject failure weren't sufficient limitation.
-- Anne Marie
It sounds silly (as was intended), but the more I think about it, we may look at renewable energy very differently in twenty years. From the long view, renewable energy sources like wind and wave may be much more environmentally sound - but far from the assumed perfection.
The legal questions here are similar to mineral rights cases of the last century. If your neighbor installs a wind farm near your property and suddenly your natural bird sanctuary is ruined, can you sue? We know from case law that it is legally hinky to divert a river onto your property no matter what your purpose (even generating renewable hydropower). Wavegen may have farther-reaching effects on the surrounding environment, slightly ruducing the amount of oxygen in the water, endangering wildlife by changing the way the tides play out in a given hydrosystem.
Something to think about.
now on with the stupid crap...
sec - new inspiration!
Taken from the Matrix, and to continue my monkey theme for the day... (you can see where I'm going already)... not only can we take a bunch of monkeys and use them for p2p networking, but we can leach off their energy, too!
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
I didn't see any costs in the press release. Anyone know the $/kw capitial cost? What is the overall $/kW-h electricity cost? It's hard to judge the technology if you don't know the cost.
Renewable energy sources all have these things in common:
1. They all pollute more than nuclear fission.
2. They are all more dangerous than nuclear fission.
3. They all cost more than nuclear fission.
4. They are all less reliable than nuclear fission.
5. None of them are sustainable.
Nuclear fission, a non-renewable power generation technology, is the only sustainable one yet invented. All of the renewables have problems. Some of the problems with wave generation are: salt-water corrosion; largely unable to be located where power is needed; construction expense; upkeep expense; danger to workers; destruction of natural resources (marine environments, whether beaches or offshore, are natural resources -- putting power plants in them = destruction); and variability of fuel (sometimes waves are high, sometimes not so high).
The fundamental important point is sustainability. Nuclear fission is sustainable on paper for at least 5 billion years, meaning it can outlast the sun.
Nikola Tesla harnessed the "ether" energy that drives those waves.
Upon his death, the FBI seized all his equipment and records, in the interest of "national security."
Oil company stock, anyone?
The PR said 500KW generated power. It doesn't say whether the whole shebang is set up for DC or AC power (I would assume DC, but those crazy Europeans...), so transform it up to 115,000VAC and you can wire it a goodly distance. Not to Nebraska or anything, but each coastal state could be served, I think.
The bigger danger is not uneven distribution of cheap wave electricity -- it's whether or not the enviros get their panties in a wad over it.
If you tried to build Hoover Dam today, you could just hang it up. No way would environmental activists allow it to be built. Granted, this isn't Hoover Dam, but enviro-activists can be pretty touchy.
Another side yet to be seen is how it looks -- if it's a Big Ugly Chunk O' Concrete, people with $20,000/acre oceanfront property won't stand for them to be built anywhere near them, which will either decrease the number of installed units or increase the cost/per (the cost of hiding those sumbitches will likely be exhorbitant). Plus, power companies buying already inflated real estate to locate these generators will increase the cost. It's possible that this "cheap" electricity won't affect power prices at all.
(I don't have any numbers, but in general the biggest expense in a distribution industry -- the industry power companies are in, not generation -- is the distribution, ironically enough. They can cut the marginal cost of creating electricty to nothing, but it still costs you .002/kwh because of the cost of distributing that power to you, maintaining the distribution channels, paying off legislators to keep their fingers out of the pie, etc.)
And we rednecks in Mississippi are screwed, too. The MS coast is protected by barrier islands, so our waves are in the 1-2ft range (most of the time, 30ft storm surge from Camille notwithstanding).
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
the article states:
Furthermore, renewable energy supporters say some research suggests that less than 0.1% of the renewable energy within the world's oceans could supply more than five times the global demand for energy - if it could be economically harvested.
How do you determine if its economically viable? If, hypothetically, we removed all of the worlds non-renewable resourced powerplants and only had these wave generators... it would be economically viable, wouldn't it? The price of electricity might change, but that wouldn't effect the viability of these wave powered generators. This would only work though if there was laws against using non-renewable resources to generate energy, the world over. Hence, sooner or later we're going to need a global government to help make these important global decisions.
...geothermal...is really driven by the remaining heat from a fusion reaction within the earth...
Geothermal energy is the remaining heat from decaying uranium and thorium within the earth. There are no reactions involved, fission or fusion (Save for a natural fission reactor here or there. But natural reactors only speed up the process -- they cannot create more heat than would be created anyway from natural decay.).
On the upside, the kinetic energy of the oceans is normally dissipated as heat. Draining kinetic energy will cool the oceans, keeping the Earth cool in the process. Also the fish yields around Cuba will decrease sharply, causing the people to rise up against their communist overlords ;-)
...the glass is half full...
My other sig is also a
But the real question is... how many of these will it take to power a Pentium IV?
Anyone know what the environmental impact would be if one removes some of the kinetic energy from the oceans? I could see it maybe changing shorelines, shifting or destroying habitats, in more extreme cases damaging or destroying reefs, and the most extreme altering the global energy flow that takes place via the undersea currents from the equator to the poles, resulting in global weather pattern changes. Great technology if it doesn't bite us in the ass.
Anxiously awaiting your clarification...
--
Liberty uber alles.
This is great news! But I can hardly believed that we actually discovered Wave Motion Energy without the help of Queen Starsha.
I don't think we should rely on that completely, though, as I alluded to in my original posting. We should use solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, as well as this. Diversification is good!
Also note the 0.1% would supposedly, according to the press release, produce 5 times the amount of energy the world needs - so divide by 5 first. Then if only a fraction of that is needed due to producing via other eco-friendly ways, it becomes even smaller. Considering the benefits of eliminating fossil-fuel and nuclear methods of power generation, I'd say we'd see a major net gain in environmental effects worldwide.
Actually, the idea of using air turbines sounds incredibly inefficient. Aren't there better ways of using tidal and wave forces against the force of gravity to produce significantly more resistant (and hence stronger) turbine forces?
I remember seeing these generators on some Discovery program several years ago. Is the only new thing here the commercial application of one?
For one thing, a wave coming ashore doesn't simply END, it reflects some of its energy back into the ocean. When I was younger, I used to help my father with LandSat and SeaSat data (1970s satellites) and specifically plotting wave patterns in the Chesapeake Bay and the ocean around the mouth of the Bay. The view-from-space wave patterns miles around the Bay mouth, and in fact any land feature, clearly show that the wave doesn't just dissipate upon hitting the shore. This system would tend to absorb some sizable fraction of that otherwise reflected energy. That WOULD affect wave patterns for miles around.
Here's a ;sa mple image of ocean wave patterns in the Galapagos Islands - the reflection is clearly visible.
Secondly, waves carry sediment. When you slow down a wave, or absorb its energy, you cause the suspended sediment to drop out ("sedimentation"). Particles drop out near where you absorb the energy, starting with the larger particles. Also, changes induced in the underwater current flow near the shore would change the erosion patterns. The practical effect of this is that the shoreline and the underwater topography around the generators would begin to change.
Many beachfront communities already deal with this phenomenon - putting up jettys and breakwaters tend to cause sand buildup or erosion in strange locations - sometimes miles away along the shore, sometimes at the breakwater. It's not completely understood yet, but what IS understood is that wave-absorbing devices cause sedimentation and erosion problems that must be addressed.
In summary, placing this system would certainly not be free of erosion, sedimentation or other environmental effects. Naturally there is also a corresponding effect on the long-term efficiency of the generator. If you build this system, you commit to large-scale dredging - or moving the generators periodically. And who knows whether that nearby beachfront condo will survive the next ten years? Not quite as "renewable" as it first sounds.
The overriding principle: Nature tends to mold itself around obstacles. If we create obstacles, we end up having to fight natural processes that want to remove them. This system would be no different.
* Split Infinity Music
* ~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Now if only they could get it to use particles, instead of waves... :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Okay, so we build a breeder reactor, and then build anouther one next to it to automaticly take the weapons grade plutoniumn and extract more energy from that. (Or can a breeder reactor then react the plutonium, I don't see why not, but I don't claim to be an expert.) I know there are reactors that run on plutonium, and you convert to weapons grade plutonium to non-weapons grade by mixing in inert implurities.
Now I agree that if security is a problem then breeder reactors are a bad idea, but security is a well understood propblem, and that risk can be minimised.
Technology marchs along where we want it to go right. In the 1860s (1863 I think) there was an explosion at a flour milling plant that took out 1/3 of the worlds milling. The plant that replaced it couldn't explode because they used technology to prevent it. We know plutonium can explode, but we can build technology so that there can never be that concentration.
It's pretty easy to see that the wider the diameter of a wire, the less resistance it has. I'm not sure what you're basing your info on.
You're right that they step up the voltage and use low current and then use the transformer box on your house to convert it back into low voltage, higher current power to run your appliances, but regardless of the voltage, the thicker the wire, the less the resistance and thus the less heat given off by the wire.
It's because they need to use thick wires that they use aluminum to run power lines instead of copper, because copper is too expensive to produce that much wire.
--- Don't be a player hater: I meta-mod ALL negative mods as Unfair.
Jamie
I remember doing a science experiment in HS about this. (I was on Cape Cod .. so lots of waves around)
One of the professors was REALLY keen on this stuff, and there was an after school ECHO type club that got involved in trying to use tide swells to turn a turbine.
The wind tunnel thing i never thought of .. which was probally stupid considering you could never hold a notebook still to write notes .. should have been obvious.
They had windmills that they set up .. which would power some of the lights across the beachs (charging nicad batteries SLOWLY to store the electricity. That got funded by the state I think ..or one of the conservation societies .. I dont remember which .. that was quite some time ago :(
but from a guy born to a town that revolved around the sea .. this sounds like a great way to keep us from screwing it up even more.
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
Then as now there are two problems.The first is technical, the second is a problem of will.
1) Reliability is always a question. How high will the swells and tide be?
2) Like the fuel cell and the super-efficient car we've had the technology available for decades. The problem is money and desire. With the fossil fuel companies owning the governments there is little will in the public sector to develop this stuff. The private sector energy companies (Ayn Rand Fundamentalists notwithstanding) has no stake in upsetting their own applecart.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
I don't think this is the first power station that uses waves. In France, we already have such a power station at La Rance for many years (the turbines are classical ones, though). By the way, even if the principle looks interesting, we are experiencing big problems because the mud is sticky and fills the holes containing the turbines...
People talk about increasing the power generated to cover the world's power consumption needs. Personally I think it should be a two-pronged approach. Firstly increasing renewable energy sources, and secondly reducing overall consumption so that the percentage of power that comes from renewable energy is again increased.
This is why I read Future Energies. It tries to cover both. For example a compressed-air powered car that can travel 60km/h for 120km on a 30cents charge. Solar-powered parking meters that don't need to be on the grid at all.
There is no point upgrading to state-of-the-art radiators if you are going to leave your windows open.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Removing kinetic energy from waves won't cause unwanted harm because the energy would have been released on the coastline in the first place?
Well, what about those ecosystems that depend on it being released on *them* -- namely, the critters (and plants) that live in intertidal zones and rely on heavy surf for their survival? There are many such ecosystems, and they are indeed important. Who knows what impact it will have? Maybe it'll be small, but it certainly -won't- be non-zero. If you affect surf, you'll affect the intertidal zone.
Too much physics and not enough biology.
In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it. -John Archibald Wheeler
Homes getting bigger is actually a good thing. Soon, within the next few decades, very efficient, environmentally-friendly cars will be available. So, you don't need to worry so much about people having to travel further due to sprawl. Now, if you lower the population density, you have ultimately less expenditure of energy. What produces more energy? 10sq miles with 10,000 people, or 10sq miles with 10 people?
I'm not usually a flamer, but this is the number one most asinine statement I've read in about a year of Slashdotting. Actually I have to wonder if you're being sarcastic (your giddy enthusiasm for the Miracle Auto suggests you're not).
The only way 10 people per 10 mi2 vs 10000 per mi2 gets us anything is if you execute the other 9990 people. Otherwise they do, um, have to live somewhere. And yes, the closer they live to each other the less energy they'll use, all other things being equal.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Which situation requires more energy? 10000 people in 10 sq miles, or 10000 people in 10000 square miles?
Ultimately, lowering the population density won't do a thing for your level of energy consumption if you don't lower the population at the same time.
Spreading people thinner takes more energy, not less... even if transportation becomes more efficient, for bulk goods like food, water, and perhaps even heat, central distribution will always be more economical than trying to send out thousands of shipments of groceries all over the one-person-per-square-mile wilderness.
Furthermore, regardless of energy costs, it is deleterious to the local environment to build roads and low density housing because of the effect it has on the watershed-- roads and roofs are impervious to rain, and when there are a lot of roads and roofs in an area, that means that when it rains, all the water runs into the streams at once, instead of slowly leaching through trees, grass, and soil. Streams run abnormally low until it rains, when the unaturally fast influx of water causes them to flood. Better to concentrate this damage in cities (where you can commit to sacrificing nature entirely) than wreck every watershed you can find across the land.
-------------------- the list is long. dirac angestung gesept
Sorry, I bothered to comment on how beyond reason his statement was. I hope you don't mind.
-------------------- the list is long. dirac angestung gesept
Actually they don't use fat wires at all, they step the voltage up into the thousands with very low current, this allows them to transport electric very efficiently on tinner cables, there is actually less resistance so less power is lost through the network, i.e. the cables don't heat up a significant amount (that's why birds can sit on them).
If you have a high current, low voltage, the opposite is true, they would need huge cables that would basically heat up like a big electric heater, the loss would be so great the distance you could span would only be a few miles. Also... the poor little birdy would be roasted if he sat on one of these wires.
Az.
Your correction is actually incorrect. Since the start of the laser telemetry studies which you refer to (they started during the Apollo era), it has been found that the moon has been moving away from the earth at a rate of about 3cm per year. (For a reference, see here). IT won't escape earth's gravity, but it is moving away from the earth.
If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...
I wonder what the consequences are of taking this energy away from the ocean? Less erosion on coasts, leading to greater land mass, leading to less oceanic evaporation, leading to all of Earth becoming a dry desert, like in Mad Max? :)
Or if the waves are caused by the wind created by the rotation of the earth, maybe the earth would slow down, making days longer, and winds would be weaker, so wind power would become less effective? Also, perhaps the perception of time would dilate, and people would die at an earlier age, except for super-intelligent genetically-mutated people, who could perceive time at the current rate, and would appear to have Matrix-like moves to the other ordinary people!
Or if the waves are partially caused by lunar gravity, could the removal of this energy result in the de-orbiting of the moon, in which case the surface of the earth would be devastated by a massive Earth-Moon collision?!?
We must stop this project, if the future of the species is to be maintained! Everyone, burn more fossil fuels! It's clearly the safest energy source!
Ah yes
I noticed there were not notices of:
- Environmental impacts
- Number of usable sites
- Actual cost per usable unit of power
Things to consider before you run out and buy one:- Anytime you put something into the water, you change the water flow. This impacts the shape of the waves hitting the shore. There have been numerous problems with man-made changes to shorelines impacting shoreline up and down shore of the change...washing out homes, building new sand bards, etc.
- Anytime you take energy out of a system, you change the dynamics of the system. If you remove x% of energy from the wave fronts in an area, what will be the impact? For instance, will additional sand bars build up because the waves do not have enough power to maintain the existing shoreline?
I don't want to sound all doom and gloomI hope that before someone goes out and builds entire islands of these things, we make sure the environmental impacts are known and acceptable to all, including tree huggers....
Created using 100% man-made electrons...
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Enjoy.
-Hatta
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
One problem is the transmission back from the generating station back to shore. These station should work better in "open" sea better than surf areas (more Z and less Z vector).
Pulling 50KV lines along the bottom of the sea doeas have it's problems.
I guess environmental damange is relative... and a matter of balance, I'm sure this approach is better than pumping huge amounts of hydrocarbons into the air.
The city operates a municiple utility. They have a hydro plant that generates electricity via wave action for the sole purpose of selling power to the grid in order to provide a monthly rebate. In other words, the buy and sell power to the grid every month (kind of like every other utility).
Marblehead is a "head" of land that juts into the ocean near Salem (of witch killing fame). I lived their a few months ago and my most expensive electic bill was $18 in December, 1996, with 8 computers and a big audio system on all the time, dishwasher, etc. Okay, heat was from oil but in the summer, the electric bill with rebate was as low as $10! Yes, this was residential.
OT*** Why did I ever move?!?!
Seeing that a toaster consumes just over 1kW, I seriously doubt this form of power generation will have any overall effect on oil consumption. Think of it this way, assuming a P4 draws 50W you would need one powerplant for ever 2000 CPUs. Throw in RAMBUS, a good video card, monitor, ..... We're talking 1 power plant for every 1000 PCs. How realistic is that? Power produced on the West coast would never make it through LA so there's little need to worry about transporting it.
Another interesting idea for tidal power generation is the proposed James Bay Project. Now this will never happen due to environmental factors but would produce far more power then even the Hoover Dam. Let me explain...
James Bay is just off Hudson Bay in North Eastern Canada. Look at a globe and you'll see it, it's that big. Anyway, the entrance to the bay is very narrow so the idea is to build a dam across it. Now take the area of the bay, assume 8-10' for the tides (they're above average), the number of tides in 24hours (around 2 - anyone know exactly?) and you have a whole lot of water that would have to pass through the dam. Lets face it, anything that could make the Hoover Dam look small is pretty damn impressive.
The idea was proposed a while back but scuttled due to the environmental factors. Probably a good thing it never went through. Ah, if only...
Willy
A peripherally related random thought...
What if we fitted a large number of these generator stations with pipes? It could become the world's biggest pipe organ, and you could actually listen to the ocean sing!
Noise pollution aside, that would be way cool.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
It's FANTASIC
finally we're using the moon for SOMETHING
other than the bay of fundy that is
The fly wheel idea is different and it would slow the rotation of the earth. So that kind of generator would lenghten the day while the Wells Turbine generators would shorten both the month, (as measured by pahse of the moon), and the year.
The fly wheel generator can be run in reverse as a motor. This would allow energy to be taken from the rotation of the earth at one location and put back in at another. Used this way, it is a mechanism for transmitting energy rather than generating it.
"Obtuse Anger is that which is greater than Right Anger" - Lewis Carroll
Hmmm... near the end of the article it mentions using a different tech for near shore generation. I wonder if you could convert a drilling platform into a massive float/piston driven turbine rig... have a wind farm as well for local energy/backups all driving a flywheel that stores the energy, then beam it off site via microwaves.
The platforms are already out there, and the sea can get much more choppy (20' swells during a storm are not uncommon IIRC) so there is some potential for massive storage/transfer.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0103443/
That still sounds like awfully lots of energy, and I don't think we are going to harvest that much energy from the ocean -- ever. It is like saying "if we could harvest 0.1% of all the energy output of our sun..."; the problem is not that collecting that much energy will harm the environment or something like that (which may still be possible, since energy circulation in the ocean is tightly coupled with the weather patterns on the planet), it is that we simply cannot do that due to the energy distribution in the sea. My $.02.
My question is, what would happen if we reduced the kinetic energy of the moon so much that the tides became weaker -- what effect would this have on the moon. From what I gather the moon's already on its way into distant space -- would the mass of the planetary oceans being stagnant, rather than chasing the moon around, affect this plight?
Save the Waves!
Harnessing .1% of the ocean's energy sounds like an impossible task. Just as impossible as harnessing .1% of the Sun's energy hitting the earth or .1% of the wind. How many wave stations, solar panels, windmills would that take?
.5 MW is not very much power in the scheme of things, and I'd be interested to know how much it cost to build. I'd also like to know how much of the coastline they fouled up with their generators. And while renewable energy is good in theory I'd like to know how much energy was used manufacturing the equipment. One often finds the amount used is getting up there with the amount it will generate over many years. Is this just a solution for 400 remote homes?
Many questions, many more answers required.
After all these thousands of years of mankind stuffing up his environment in innovative new ways, there are *STILL* people who think that we can do things like this and it will have no effect .. amazing ..
What the press release doesn't make clear is that Wavegen's generator has actually made its schedule: the 2000 rollout was promised back in 1998. How many technologies do you know which have made their window like that?
What the press release also doesn't mention is how Wavegen's generators don't pose the same ecological threat that other generators have historically posed: the chief alternative is a "tidal fence" which completely blocks off the channel in the same way a dam blocks off a river. And like with dams, tidal fences can disrupt the migration and spawning patterns of fish and other sea creatures, who shouldn't be forced to bear the brunt of human progress upon their tuckered little bodies. Wavegen's generators, as you can see from the diagram pose no such risk.
Now, let's just make sure we don't steal too much momentum from the moon and have it crash into the earth. That would put a real damper on any ipo.
-- Anne Marie
Plants designed today have a design-basis lifespan of about 60 years. Also many older plants have had their licensing extended to a total of about 50 years. Basically the output stays constant, but again, many plants have increased their output. This is mostly due to improved fuels and also more precise modelling made possible with today's computers. The cost of nuclear energy varies alot from country to country, mostly due to the difference in capital costs. As a general rule, nuclear power is competetive with coal and cheaper than natural gas and all renewables except hydro-electric.
I stand corrected. Thanks for pointing that out... Wow, I'm out of touch on the Moon's distance :)
what about a volcanic based steam turbine?
.oO0Oo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
For example, after having built a few small hydro-electric plants, you notice that you can get loads of electricity out of them for almost no ongoing costs, and you don't end up with horribly polluted cities like you did when you were burning coal. So you say, "Great! Let's go build hydro-dams", and you set off round the country looking for good spots on large rivers to start erecting dams.
Fast forward a few decades. Suddenly hydro isn't looking so exciting. You've dammed up all your large rivers at massive public cost -- it turns out building dams is really difficult. Most of the dams you've built came in over-budget and aren't generating as much electricity as they were supposed to. The eco-systems down river of the dams are trashed because they aren't getting enough water. The eco-systems up river are trashed because they're flooded. When the dam was closed you flooded a bunch of great farm land, and now all the vegetation on that land is rotting under water and releasing tons of greenhouse gasses. But you've still got lots of electricity for the future, right? Wrong. It turns out all your dams are filling up with sediment, and are going to be useless in a few years anyway.
That's when you turn to nuclear ... same deal. Supposed to be cheap, clean and renewable. Turns out to be expensive, dangerous and polluting. The people who told us to pay them to build nuclear plants and who said they'd be safe and cheap don't seem to be home when the plants need to be decomissioned, or when it comes to being legally liable for meltdown risk.
So what above wave power? Well it sounds like there's a pretty good chance that it's going to be a lot less damaging than coal, nuclear or hydro, and we should certainly start using it in wider deployments. We sure could use better alternatives to what we're doing now. But lets not just assume that building wave barriers entirely around every coastal country isn't going to have some environmental impact -- to figure that out you'll need ecologists paid by industry independent organizations, whose opinions will be listened to and not just swept under the carpet (as in the case of Nuclear or Hydro).
Final point -- the real win optimizations here are to decrease our needs for energy by looking for less energy intensive technologies and by reducing the uses that we do have. Anyone still using incandescent light bulbs? And what the hell happened to Green PCs? Those high power PIII and Athlon processors burning up more juice than ever before. What do you think those fans and heat sinks are for?
The incentive for invention of better low-power technologies will be commercial. That means that electricity costs should reflect actual production costs, and that means we have to stop subsidising (non-renewable) electricity generation with taxes.
We also need to stop the growth of world population.
As far as coastal habitats, from the article:
[Mass power generation] would probably involve large-scale wave plants in near-shore or off-shore environments, a technology still being developed.
Now, I'm not saying there are no ecological implications as a result of this technology, but I think that it must certainly be less than those from fossil fuels and nuclear power generation.
As far as overconsumption, what do you figure is the "right" amount of consumption? 1950s? 1900s? If consumption can be maintained without the negative impact on resources, is it a bad thing?
The Adbuster article you reference specifically translates the negative impact of consumption in to fossil fuel consumption-- with technolgies such as the tidal generator, the negative externality of pollution goes away. The heat issue is entirely different, but advances in technology are reducing losses due to heat at a pretty good rate.
Consumption is not necessarily a bad thing.
Actually, in this case the energy is (almost) free. A wave travelling to shore will carry with it a certain amount of kinetic energy, which is then dispersed on the beach (That's how sand is made, kinetic force on the rocks). This generator would merely be in place of the beach (or possibly slightly offshore), so the force would be transferred to the turbine instead of the beach. And that's just the incoming wave. the backwash/backcurrent/flowback/whatever it's called when the wave retreats from the shore is produced by gravity, and so harnessing the power from that as well (becuase the turbine will turn regardless of which way the air is flowing) poses no problems (gravity ain't gonnna run out on us any time soon!). End result; Less erosion on beaches, practically free energy sources. (so maybe sand will be a bit coarser in a few hundred years then it would be otherwhise. At least the beaches will be in the same place, not 5 metres higher up)
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
Strap a bunch of these to the legs of Sealand and bang (or whoosh) a local, consistant power supply.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal...
What is the ecological impact of putting wave generators all over the coastline to generate power? How many beaches and coastline ecosystems will be destroyed? Will fisheries be reduced in productivity?
How much does it cost to build a wave plant? How survivable are the plants to storm damage?
In the area where this thing is installed, there'd be less splashing, and probably less wind - especially if an entire coastline is populated with them.
...
...
Who knows what the environmental effect would be? Perhaps the local ecosystem would be less moist, perhaps not
True though, that there would be *some* impact. But not nearly as bad as say, depleted radioactive fuel that our descendants are going to have to figure out how to handle somewhere down the line
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Waves and currents aren't "bad." Changing the pattern of such waves and current *might* be "bad."
Just because erosion is the most visible effect from a human point of view doesn't mean stopping it is a "good" thing for the environment. We frankly don't know exactly what will happen. And it's always a good idea to take a hands-off approach when dealing with something like the environment where it is damn near impossible to know all the variables.
That said, I still think this is a MUCH better system than burning fossil fuels for energy. Utilizing wave energy will give us as much clean power as we need for as long as the sun shines, and the moon orbits the earth. And I don't think that a .01% (if we ever even approach that high of a utilization) power drain on the ocean will have a very big effect.
- I wonder how miniature you can get with these generators... a string of anchored bouys in a lake?
- How about a large container of air with a small opening that uses atmospheric pressure changes to generate air flow? (Maybe not the best idea, but think further down that line and I'm sure someone will come up with something... the ocean of air we live in has waves, too.)
- What about ocean liners with a similar solution, customized as necessary?
- (for fun) have a bathtub water and anchored bouy generators to power your server in the event of a power outage...
:)
The possibilities are (almost) endless!...I don't have enough faith to believe in the "big bang"...
is a good thing.
OTEC is another underrated renewable energy source.
Amorphis
"this both sucks and blows" -Bart
I feel that consumption at present rates coupled with uncontrolled population growth is the problem. We have got to choose something soon: Either curb population growth, or seriously reduce needless consumption (get our priorities straight - as a global community). I wont even guess at 'what is the right amount of consumption" - but what I will say it is: much less than now.
externality of pollution goes away
We can push back the overall negative effects with cleaner power generation - but EVENTUALLY we will have to start making the hard choices... why put it off and take chances or leave it for our children to deal with? Its simply irresponsible.