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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.
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?
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
This one is actually on the local grid, contributing power. This is a really neat concept -- really, really "direct current!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
But you can't use all the surface, you can only use coastlines...except if you add more coastline through excavation or island-building.
Jamie
Does one use high explosives when doing nuclear excavation? Well, I suppose you do in the final milliseconds of the assembly of the device...
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!
You forgot the radioactive and toxic waste from a coal plant; it's not all CO2 and water.
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.
Enjoy.
-Hatta
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Here is a fairly detailed description
The short answer is that it uses a variable pitch turbine. The idea is somewhat related to tacking a sailboat.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
It's FANTASIC
finally we're using the moon for SOMETHING
other than the bay of fundy that is
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?
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
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.
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.
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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. --
"this both sucks and blows" -Bart