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Alternative Energy: Power Via Coastal Wave Motion.
lavalamp writes "Scottish company Ocean Power Delivery has developed a sectional-torpedo-looking-thing as a means to transform the raw fury of the sea into electricity! I'm curious to see what happens when another drunk Exxon captain plows into a field of these things. They just secured a 8.6m (usd) in funding to continue research and build a large scale prototype." The company has won a contract to produce a 750kw "plant" off of the scottish coast and has an mou to produce a 2Mw project off of the coast of Vancouver Island in Canada. While this is far from being free energy, it is a pretty interesting way of deriving power from the tides. A side benefit is that surfers will finally be able to rail like their boarding cousins.
Well, considering Hazelwood wasn't at the helm I suppose it'd be a first if it happened. Why is it that environmentalists looking for alternate power sources have to bash the oil companies?
I swear, it's as bad as the open source zealots going after microsoft. Why can't people just say, "Hey - alternate power cool!" instead of bashing the oil companies? Because, let me tell you, the oil companies are a lot better than Microsoft as far as their antics. Microsoft doesn't have a bunch of hippies surrounding every office building 24/7 waiting to bust them for hurting some fuzzy animal.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
"and has an mou to produce "
What language is that ?
Of course, this energy doesn't come free ... I suspect that the result of extracting energy from the tides would be a very slight slowing of the Earth's rotation, or the slowing of the rotation of the moon around the Earth. Conservation of momentum/energy.
Probably a very, very small effect though.
Of course, I'm talking out of my ass now. Anyone care to do the math and figure out how much energy we would have to extract / how long it would take before we started noticing any change?
When will those Dune windtraps become reality??
Seriously, power generation via wave is old news.
Check out this site for some backgrounds.
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
I wonder if they've studied the effects of using things like this first. I mean sure, it's clean energy....but damn first off it kills the view right off the bat. How about marine life, how do they take to giant red torpedo's in their environment. Does it confuse them? etc.... Is this only going to be done in places people don't frequent for surfing and swimming. There's very little information on the site, leaves ya with more questions than answers.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
How do these things interact with sea life? Often, various species of fish and invertabrate type creates cling to relatively stationary type things in the ocean- often intentional, such as when an obsolete ship is sunk for an artificial reef.
So if sea life starts to make a home out of these things, will it interfere with their operation? I could probably figure it out from their PDF's but I've left work and my brain has shut down for the day.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I remember these books I had on "How things work" when I was a kid. One of them was all about the earth itself, volcanos, wind, water, the works.
I vividly remember a picture of a wave with a bunch of strange yellow things in it. The things were wave braker like devices that used the power of the waves to generate electricity.
"When I was a kid" is somewhere around the mid eighties here, I guess.
If everything I learned from books then is going to be re-invented this century I think we still have a LONG list ahead of us. Let's hope they pass up on some of the more stupid ones, like Windows 3.0.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
You gotta love a place named the Firth of Forth.
-Frank
Exactly what's new?
Put two or more linkend fliating vessels into the sea, and tap their relative kinetic energy. This has been on the drawing bord since 1980, and in the water since 199x...
Baaaaad submittter, now go back to the cave.
//Wegge
I wonder what nasty side-effects that will cause in the ocean.
You just can't take energy out of a system without a side-effect.
Of course, it will only be an issue if it is ever scaled up.
Seems like it'd be really easy to hide a bomb in one of these farms. They will definently need some good security to make sure these farms don't get sabotaged and in turn wipe out electricity, not to mention the possibility that such a disaster might wreak havok on the ecology. Still, a novel concept, one step closer to cleaning up our environment.
Is the Coastal Wave Motion Gun next?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I'm wondering if this isn't something that might help us here in California with our so-called "energy crisis".
I firmly believe that we're all getting ripped off by the energy companies out here, and that the crisis would be solved if the idiot power companies would shape up. However, this doesn't seem to be happening, so perhaps this might bring some new companies to the table, and possible spark a little competition out here? Perhaps at least give us more options so we can quit being raped by our electric bills. Even with cutting back, I'm paying a lot.
Besides, to cut back anymore would require powering down my servers. That's just not gonna happen.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
That would make a nice beach... :)
I'd rather not put the thing near my house..
Maybe they can stick it far far away!
i hate pansy republicans
Don't forget this older slashdot article that deals with the dangers of tidal power, namely that since it's the moon's gravitational pull that powers the tides, by harnessing them for power, we'll slow the moon down in its orbit, causing it to fall and crash into the earth. Probably onto some kind of target laid out by Taco Bell as a free taco promotion.
This tagline is umop apisdn.
No oil company bashing from this AC. However, unless this power generation technique is competitive with burning petroleum at about US$33 per barrel, it won't be practical in the long run. The same thing applies to any energy generation, recovery or conservation scheme.
This is because the petroleum supply curve has a bend in it, and that bend implies huge surpluses above a certain breakpoint, which in 2002 is about $33 per barrel.
The bend is there because of the natural distribution of oil deposits - they're lognormally distributed with respect to energy content. This phenomenon applies to the supply curves for all minerals deposited by sedimentary processes, BTW.
Won't the environmentalists be embarassed then!
8.6m usd? According to my metric-enabled calculator, that works out to 0.86 cents in funding. This has to be a joke. How is this news?
What a smashing development.
They sure seem energetic about this idea.
Within months the company will be all washed up.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Though this design is nothing new (I remember a theoretical drawing in a high school textbook), it's excellent to hear that some medium scale implementations are going though.
I can't help but think how this compares to the US energy policy, which basically boils down to "clean coal" and scrapping regulations that would mandade fuel efficency and pollution reductions. As troubling as this is from an environmental perspective, what's more troubling is the lack of desire within the leadership of this nation to actively invest in and pursue technology.
We as a nation seem to be more than willing to let our technological advantages slip away in our moment of decadence.
Iceland is buiding fuel-cell technology into their public buses and merchant/fishing fleet. Scotland is making power from the waves. East Germany has an all-fiber telecom network, and we have... "clean coal" and SUVs that get less than 18mpg.
Hmmmm... I don't like where this is going in the long run. The US government has the biggest bankroll of any nation. We should be putting it to better use if you ask me.
Howard Dean for president
In a related story, researchers in belgium are working on a prototype system designed to capture usefull levels of electric power from night-club dance floors.
"Many people haven't personally seen the levels of activity that frequently are exerted in the techno-music scene. It's really quite suprisingly frenetic" says one researcher.
And because all night dance clubs are so popular in Euroland, there is a not insignificant untapped potential for power generation. The scientists are especially exited to be developing a prototype system to be deployed in Ibiza, Spain.
"What's especially fitting about this locale, is that a majority of the partiers [or, as we like to call them, acoustically stimulable periodic mass distributors] are in fact foreign tourists; which truly is free energy. They even pay to stay here, and pay for the food they are so efficiently converting into mechanical energy!
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
Is it really safe to fire the wave motion gun so close to the planet like that?
I don't like to post off-topic and will probably get modded down, but that website really isn't designed to well. First of all, it has frames which in general rarely work well, and it has the scrolling marquee which has the standard problems in IE where it works, and just displays improperly in netscape. It looks like they did not even test it in netscape because of the frame borders. Even in IE, they fit the text so that you have to scroll left and right to read it (on my screen at least). It is full of pdfs, which wouldn't really be a problem, but it opens it inside the smaller frame.
<rant mode off, going back to real life... now!>
Well, if you take energy out of a system (like the ocean) you cool it down, right? So maybe if we get enough of these suckers, we can refreeze all those icebergs that are breaking off down in Antarctica...
This isn't a new technology. Back in the 70's two were build... but here's an article on it here. Took 3 months to get /.'ed?
Things like this are bound to be more efficient than wind power(the site doesnt seem to say), and produce as much power as many small/medium nuclear plants. If things like this are developed, eventually there will be no need for a company like enron.
;)
Interesting that this is developed in the same country where brownian motion was first discovered by scottish scientist Robert Brown....
The same country that first thought alot about chaotic particle motion develops a really interesting way to get energy out of chaotic-ly moving particles
sorta...
Drunken Exxon Captain. Extra points for dolphins slimed in the event of an oil spill, or automatic win for crashing into Cowboyneal if mating with a dolphin, because the world is just not ready for that kind of offspring.
developed a sectional-torpedo-looking-thing as a means to transform the raw fury of the sea into electricity!
:)
Or, if you build one in Coney Island, the raw sewage of the sea, hypodermics and all.
I used to live there. I know what I'm talking about. I used to live on the Jersey coast too, but that'd be too easy.
Triv
Nope. That was using -tidal- power, [where you capture the high tide and then drain it for kinetic energy]. This is different, it is dampening the energy out of waves caused by wind. Of course, this could ultimately affect climate if done in open ocean or something, but generally I imagine it would be done for waves that would otherwise crash to shore. So, if anything, it will just reduce the rate of erosion, [and piss os surfers].
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
Dear God!!! What is slashdot coming to??
Im disapointed in you all.
In Soviet Russia you dant have to put up with these crappy jokes
I'm just imagining what the marine life around these things will look like once they've been in place a few years. Far from being detrimental, they'll actually be prime real estate for marine life. They will provide shade and places for seaweed and other plant life to grow. A single piece of driftwood in the open ocean can attract a lot of marine life, so imagine what these babies will do.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
This isn't the only wave-energy project currently in development. There's also a project by a Dutch company (AWS BV.), called the Archimedes Wave Swing. Their 6MW pilot plant is to be tested from April onwards in Portugal. It's a really interesting concept, using the law of Archimedes to generate power.
You can find it at http://www.waveswing.com
This could be really cool. It's not going to slow down the earth. It does not work off the tide. And hey, they are trying something different in an attempt to make the world a better place.
/. is overwhelmingly met w/"old news", or "bad side effects", or "will never work".
The thing that has just been pummelled into my brain lately is that every attempt at something mentioned on
Come on. Aren't many of the cherished 'ideals' around here- to try different things? To be free to learn? To build on what has come before?
Man - the negativity really wears at times.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I had heard something about this on NPR. I do not believe they indeed on trying to use the power to power homes and such, but instead, to run a desalinization plant to provide freshwater to remote places.
It becomes cost effective because it would be overly expensive to provide power out to these remote areas which desparately need fresh water. It supposedly opens up a whole bunch of land to agriculture that was unusable before.
I remember hearing about this being done before for some third world country but it failing miserably because of storms and such.
Unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to find much info on google so I could be mistaken.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
So while I'm happy to see a range of things working out as possibly viable, 750kW is not alot to get out of the resources that appear to be going into this.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
but you're not far off. At the Crystal Ballroom in Portland, OR, they have a floor on a suspension system. The whole thing moves under your feet a little. If you could harness it, you could probably generate just enough electricity to pump out the cigarette nimbus clouds that accumulate during concerts.
You know what?
I was a lazy fuck and didn't cook breakfast and just had leftover beans for breakfast and lunch. You can harvest enough power or heat from me now to keep a village going...just don't light the match.
Ocean buoys have been using similar physics for years...
Covert underwater waves to charge a battery system.
I read an interesting perspective on wave power from Dr. Peter M. Duesing regarding the exploitation of wave and tidal power here that basically says that its prospects of being a major contributor to large scale production are slight. On a small scale there are several cases that support localised usage.
Regarding Ocean POwer Delivery, there is a pdf regarding their funding package available here.
If their site goes down or if you don't want to click, here is the text clipped from the pdf:
Press release
Wave energy company Ocean Power Delivery secures £6m funding package
Edinburgh-based wave energy company Ocean Power Delivery Ltd (OPD) today announced that is has secured £6m (EUR 9.8m) funding from an international consortium of venture capital companies led by Norsk Hydro Technology Ventures (NTV), the venture capital arm of Norway's largest industrial company and including 3i, Europe's leading venture capital company and Zurich-based Sustainable Asset Management (SAM). Each organisation provided an equal level of funding to produce the largest investment of its kind in a wave power company.
The investment success builds on OPD's steady rise to prominence in the field and clears the way for the company to become the leading force in the sector.
"This investment is the culmination of OPD's intensive four-year programme to develop the Pelamis concept, the funds secured today will allow us to demonstrate and commercialise the system," says Richard Yemm, Managing Director of OPD. "Wave energy represents a major commercial opportunity and we have positioned ourselves well to take advantage of this."
The Pelamis is a long, thin, semi-submerged articulated structure composed of four cylindrical sections linked by hinged joints, the complete system is oriented head-on to incoming waves. The wave-induced motion of the joints is resisted by hydraulic rams, these pump fluid through hydraulic motors to drive electrical generators. A 750kW machine with a similar output to a modern wind turbine will be 150metres long and 3.5metres in diameter. An array of 40 Pelamis machines would provide enough power to supply the energy needs of 20,000 homes.
OPD aims to have a working prototype producing electricity to the grid within the next two years.
Many previous wave energy concepts have failed as they lack the inherent survivability of the Pelamis. The system uses the unique combination of a streamlined, low-profile form and proven technology from the offshore oil and gas sector to provide the required load-shedding and reliability to withstand the rigours of the marine environment.
OPD has recently demonstrated the system at intermediate scale in the Firth of Forth as part of a UK DTI supported programme to address all key aspects of technical risk. Further DTI support in conjunction with today's investment will allow all elements of the full-scale system to be thoroughly tested this summer before being installed in the first full-scale demonstrator next year.
In 1999 the company won a contract to install a pair of Pelamis machines off Islay within the Scottish Renewables Obligation and recently beat off stiff international competition to secure an agreement with BC Hydro, the Canadian West Coast utility, to carry out a full feasibility study for a 2MW scheme for installation off Vancouver Island during 2003.
Graeme Sword, 3i director commented: "OPD has developed a leading renewable energy technology which positions the business to take advantage of the tremendous opportunities in the rapidly developing renewable energy market. The combination of this unique technology and strong management makes OPD an ideal fit for 3i in the development of our support for alternative energy technologies."
"NTV's role is to seek exciting investments with venture capital financial returns, in arapidly evolving new energy economy." says Jørgen Rostrup, NTV's Managing Director. "We screened several wave energy machines around the world before finding Pelamis, and are delighted to work with OPD and our co-investors in commercialising this concept."
"SAM is proud to be part of this exciting project in what we have identified as a highly promising new opportunity in the renewable energy space. Dr Richard Yemm has managed to gather an impressive group of talented people who have produced a design that stands out for successfully marrying robustness with efficiency," says Gianni Operto, principal of SAM Private Equity.
ends 20 March 2002
For further information please contact:
Ocean Power Delivery Ltd
Richard Yemm or Max Carcas
Tel: +44 131 554 8444
Email: enquiries@oceanpd.com
Web: www.oceanpd.com
The URL you provided describes capturing wave power at the coastline, by installing a device into the rocks by the water.
This is completely different, a device that floats in the middle of the water and, better yet, can be chain-linked together in series. The installation expense looks to be much lower, and wouldn't damage coastlines either. In fact, you could probably install and use them when you're nowhere near a coastline, like near a free-standing drilling platform.
Forget about the problems of surfers crashing into these things -- what about a boat, I wondered? If a fishing trawler or passenger motorboat plowed through these things, they'd do serious damage to both themselves and the generators.
Then it occurred to me that they'd obviously want to mark these things off, along with painting them fluorescent orange to make them easily visible, to keep stray boats out of the area. Then I wondered about the impact on the fishing industry if these become widespread. Then it hit me: they could mark off a section of the water and use it both for fish farming and power generation. Double the economic benefits, and now you only have to worry about fish pirates in stealth submarines.
Back in the early 90s the danish inventor, Erik Skaarup, invented the wavebreaker and the design has been proven to work at an irish university.
It has (according to the studies) somewhat better effectiveness than the one mentioned in this article.
Read more here:
http://www.waveplane.com/indexuk.htm
- Miklos
* good judgement comes from experience - experience comes from bad judgement *
* good judgement comes from experience - experience comes from bad judgement *
Exxon was coerced into it (torture, murder, rape of employees), and I don't want to say "Exxon kills people," but Exxon did give these people money.
Well, I guess you could just hook up one up to consume power (lots of it) instead of generating it to make some waves. Good luck aiming it or keeping the power from simply dispersing. I'm pretty sure that most water parks have something like that hooked up for their wave pools.
Perhaps the difference here is simply that they've gotten the technology to the point that it can be efficiently implemented. Any number of technologies have been created and then taken decades to go from prototype to actually being a practical solution.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Don't you guys remember a wave power harnessing device that sat at the bottom, and they looked like flaps going back and forth? I went to the ACRE Aussie site with the neat little pictures, but it didn't have it.
Anyhow, my point of this post is to state that the benefits of having a mostly above water based system like the Pelamis (other than the junction on the sea bed) is that maintenance is easy -- it's very accessible. However, it's susceptable to traffic and damage in that regard.
The benefits of being completely submerged, like that sea-bed wave flap device I talked about earlier is that its safe from ships and people screwing around with them; however, maintenance must really blow for something like that.
I think this is a great idea -- hell, there's no energy crisis. We're just too damn content with what we have now. Good post -- even though the idea isn't completely new, the apparatus and its acceptance is.
The unit described makes use of the height difference across waves, and has nothing to do with tides, from what I can see.
In the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, there is a small tidal power plan (experimental, I think). Basically as the tidal water flows in and flows out due to the big change in tides (highest in the world), power is generated.
It seems to me that there is more potential (so to speak
Of course, the construction costs to harness it, might be more than proportionately higher.
It seems to me, one big advantage to the tides is that they're 100% reliable, whereas wave action (like wind, and solar) will vary based upon weather.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
It's not just a question of changing the waves, but the pattern of erosion on the nearby beaches/cliffs/whatever. Most coasts have reached a kind of equilibrium with the waves that hit it. When you change something (say, put in giant concrete breakers) you'll often get much greater erosion than before.
Need I say that we don't have reliable methods of modeling erosion?
Not to dismiss this as a possibility for outlying communities, but nothing comes free.
Teaching, coding, coffee, revolution.
In my view, the main problem with solar/wind/tide/wave power generation is that we can't guarantee a steady flow of energy. Excess energy can't be stored for use when we need it. Solar energy is good as a supplementary source of energy for areas with high AC usage because when usually it's hot, the sun is out. But the problem still remains that we can't rely on any of these environmental energies for a constant flow of energy, which is what we need (Having lived in CA during the energy "shortage" recently, I know of what I speak).
I think we should be spending more time/energy (hah) researching methods to store large amounts of energy. Flywheels seem to me to hold good promise of extremely high energy density, efficiency and simplicity compared to schemes involving batterie or water <-> H2+0 schemes. Just don't put any on geologically unstable areas... Any other good energy storage devices in our future?
Oh yeah, I consider fusion research (hot/cold, laser pellet/toroidal plasma etc.) a huge waste of money and resources. We've already got a fusion reactor, damnit!
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Can you give a reference -- Web site, study, anything? The current run-out-of-oil scenario is the bell-curve resource depletion model (do a Google search on K. Humbert, a USGS geologist who predicted peak of US production for 1970's). When you are on the back side of world oil production, the stuff won't be had for love, war or money. A more optimistic scenario is that if we are willing to pay more (accept slightly lower grade deposits), there is a lot more to be had. Abundant $33/bbl oil means energy is not a problem (I can easily drive my Taurus on $1.50/gal gas) -- the only sticking point would be CO2 emissions. Please fill me in on sedimentary oil geology.
just like in TA! the next step is underwater fusion plants!
bring on your commander, he can't d-gun below the surface!
I could use one of these in my waterbed. Harness the wave motion from.... uh that may be offtopic.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
but I've left work and my brain has shut down for the day.
Funny, it works the other way round with me.
Lies about crimes
Why go along with this, when in the future it migth only produce 2 MW, with a whole array of these? :-)
/Mads
Companies like NEG-micon is producing wind-turbines that can produce 2,5 MW, rigth now. With 50 of them in an off-shore park, you've got a 100 MW plant.
In my country (Denmark), we get around 50% of our energy from wind power. That is on a windy day, though
And if you actually *read* any of the top-moderated posts on the article you linked to, you'll see that the Moon would do the exact opposite. As you tap tidal energy (which the Scottish power plant doesn't, it taps wave energy) the Moon is pushed further away. Concervation of angular momentum is Highschool physics folks...
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
1 square mile of COASTAL ocean to harness enough energy to power only 22,000 homes? What kind of environmental price is this? And why is the BC gov't buying it? I'm really confused on this one -- especially since Blue Energy has been in operation here for years and has not been able to secure such a contract with a more powerful and environmentally responsible davis turbine setup to harness the ocean's currents which are very strong and predictable. As an added bonus, these systems can at the same time serve as a floating bridge. One such proposal has been made for the San Fransisco Bay. Check this stuff out!! (no I don't work for them, and don't have any financial interest there)
I wonder how these things will do during incliment weather. Guess I should go do some more reading. Heres another site about this type technology...:
Wave Energy
MessEdUp
#/var/www/v
"A side benefit is that surfers will finally be able to rail like their boarding cousins."
Do you have to be brainless musclehead to understand that ?
This is *OLD* news.
a ge/usine /usine.html
The first power plant of this kind, "l'usine marémotrice de la Rance",
has been designed in the early 60's (by an uncle of mine actually),
and is still in production to date.
See:
http://www.edf.fr/html/en/decouvertes/voy
Or google for "usine marémotrice rance"
You ever tried surfing off the coast of Vancouver Island?
I'll give you a hint---it's freezing!
Sure, there are a few hardy souls who don their drysuits and hoods, I'm not meaning to discredit them!
The view? Fish can't swim around it? An undersea structure like this will likely provide habitat for so many other creatures.
Some study needs to be done--I agree! But to write the idea off as crazy is not appropriate. I'd settle for less view, a few disgruntled surfers, fish that are on drugs, if it meant that Vancouver Island could have some energy independence from the mainland.
Currently we do not produce enough power on the island for our needs and we import it from the Mainland and Washington State. Soon they are talking about building a natural gas pipeline.
Now what do you think about it?
power stations like this aren't necessarily a good thing. yes, it sounds good at first, but the more you think about it, the less sense it makes.
example: everybody immediately thinks that hybrid vehicles will greatly reduce C0_2 emmisions. fact: when these cars don't run on gasoline, they run on electricity, usually produced from a C0_2 pumping coal power plant. however, from what i understand, some of these vehicles use energy from braking and what not to help refill the batteries, so yes, these cars may lead to a decrease in C0_2 emmisions, but probably not a significant one.
something like this will destroy coastlines. how much research are they doing into the environment of the area? lots of animals return to their conception grounds to mate, usually a beach. i'd hope they wouldn't build in these areas, but i seriously doubt they would close down a public (ie, money making) beach to build one of these.
I wonder what kind of delirious-sounding reports of strange monsters in Scottish waters this will provoke when it goes online...
-----
"Cogito Eggo Sum: I think, therefore, waffle."
These wave power generators are basically using the side effects of the wind. The wind is usually what causes the waves except when they are caused by earthquakes. Why not just use wind power instead of letting (and losing) some of the energy go into waves? The more times the energy is converted the less energy you have when it is done.
I don't have the link right now, from an efficiency standpoint electric cars are marginally more efficient than internal combustion engines because of the line/distribution losses and conversion of energy from chemical to mechanical (generator) to electrical to chemical (batteries) to electrical to mechanical (electric motor). Electric cars are much cleaner though as far as toxic fumes are concerned.
I don't know the power requirements off the top of my head, but it might be a good idea to take the power generated from tidal motion and use it to extract hydrogen from seawater. The hydrogen could then be stored, unlike electricity, and used in hydrogen fuel-cells.
If it can be make efficient enough, it would be a lot cleaner than extracting hydrogen from natural gas...
Read a good book lately?
Love the idea. On a practical level, we could power the entire world just from tidal energy - or even from the wind energy in the Western US or from the wind energy in the MidWest.
While the tidal generator might not be proven, we know we can implement wind energy today. In fact, the whole Western US/Canada energy crisis caused us to build more alternative energy in the US/Canada in the last year than we had built in the entire previous century.
A diversified energy supply would do us good - and locally-produced energy supplies are always better than energy from other sources. The more different sources we have, the less vulnerable to price fluctuations, the less vulnerable to terrorist attacks.
Maybe I should pick up a board for use here in Seattle, huh? Got one in Santa Barbara CA and one in Mount Pleasant SC - might be fun to ride the pipe on the West Coast up in BC - heard the waves there are among the best in the world.
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Not long ago, Internet startups were burning up 8.6M VC money on chairs and pool tables. If they can pull off tidal electricity with 8.6M then I'd say that's money well spent.
In my view, the main problem with solar/wind/tide/wave power generation is that we can't guarantee a steady flow of energy. Excess energy can't be stored for use when we need it.
Nah, if you have enough sources, you can feed 20 percent from alternative sources. And there are these things called fuel cells (as used now in Japan to power SUVs and light trucks) to store the stored energy.
Stop waiting. Start doing. Every dollar of oil means 50 cents for the terrorists. Action matters more than words.
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Check out: http://membres.lycos.fr/larance/main1.html (french), http://www.edf.fr/html/fr/decouvertes/voyage/usine /usine_d.html (french) or http://www.edf.fr/html/en/decouvertes/voyage/usine /retour-usine.html (english).
The 240 MW figure comes from this page: the power plant contains 24 groups, eeach group able to ouput 10 MW.
What about getting energy from the temperature differences between the top and bottom of the ocean's water column? Or would that affect ecologies too much?
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
Each of these alternative sources of energy - a) cost more per a kwH and b) at current funding levels account for (at least in the UK) a very, very small percentage of the total energy generated. I mean 750kW - that's only 250 kettles - and it stops generating when the wind dies down. It'll be a long time before any of these new energy sources become a viable alternative to what's currently available.
Video Game cheats, hints a
i live on Vancouver Island and i can only imagine what kinda storm'll break the first time a whale gets snagged by one of these contraptions. whale watching is a big industry here (just one more way to seperate the tourists from their dollars). not to mention the HIGH concentration of environmentalists that live on the coast of BC, many of whom already feel that there is too much impact on the environment. of coarse, these same greens aren't too fond of the hydro-electric damns, so maybe this'll be the lesser evil.
paranoia breeds confidence - Brazil
Hmm, I wonder how this will affect the technological singularity...where's that Mentifex guy when you need him?
Could it be argued thatn any powersource that extracts energy from wave motion would reduce the total amount of energy in the ocean, and therefore reduce the overall tempurature of the ocean, and in turn reduce ice pack melt off, planetary tempuraure, etc?
Just a thought.
Fly Fish? Participate in our forum
If it does that would be great. I live in North Dakota, a.k.a. The windiest place on earth.
The government gave a huge tax break to this company that wanted to put up a wind farm out here, they put up one windmill and then they revoked the law this year in congress, OOOPS
now we have a big honking ugly ass windmill on the side of the interstate doing nothing.
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
would it really take enough energy to make much change even if it was taking tidal energy? You're right, people should read up on thier physics before spreading scare stories.
More crap on the shoreline.
Everytime there is a storm we can look forward to tons of these generators washing onshore in pieces.
How about discouraging people from living in every remote corner of the earth? Making massive efforts to allow a handful of people to live in every corner of the earth is pretty pointless. Maybe they'd be better off living in more viable areas. Of course we could talk about reducing human population (attrition, birth control) but that is a forbidden topic it seems.
Errm, when has that created stable power output. I haven't gone to the site, but I know that it hasn't as none have mantained stable output for more than a few minutes. Hence ITOR. Hopefully that'll work nicely, but there's still a lot of engineering poblems to bring the cost down and reliability up.
I was talking about fusion power (in case you hadn't guessed by the ITOR comment) in my last post.
I surf; this means nothing to me.
I am a physicist; this is meaningless.
-> If you can't write anything meaningful about a post, don't write anything.
These things are huge, what about adding solar panels with motorised weather covers if necessary. That way you when the wather is very calm you can subsidise the wave power with solar power and vice versa. Hell while we're at it I'm sure someone is clever enough to figure out a way to combine solar, wind and wave technologies into something that size. These things are again, huge. When they are talking about 1km x 1km areas covered with these things, what an eyesore, the wave swing starts looking better and better. However if they can combine the technologies to make better use of the large closed off area, these things start looking attractive again.
can't wait till these tree-huggers kill of coastl wildlife with thier little clean energy project..lol
The Truth: There is no string:)
Too many people here are confusing tides with waves.
Tides are the result of gravity from the moon and Sun.
Waves come mostly from wind blowing over the water, and that derives from Solar (illuminative) energy.
So we won't slow the Earth down by stopping the waves, not the way you fear.
on Scottish beaches facing the north Atlantic?
I think even in August your feet wouldn't be all that hot...
"...can you imagine a BEOWULF CLUSTER of these? That'd be some serious power!"
Look at their graphs.
Their theoretical simulations are a factor of 2 above their experimental results.
They haven't a clue how it actually works when the waves aren't dead-on the normalized filtering peak of this thing.
You can throw this article on the big pile of Popular Science notions that never see the light of mass production.
--Blair
"Hey! I just discovered that if you burn trees you don't need Saudi Oil! And they grow for free in the woods!!"
Scale is the problem with this, and other so called clean technologies. Consider a roughly average sized natural gas fired combined cycle power plant of 500 MW. This roughly means that there are two gas fired turbines (think huge aircraft engine) hooked up to a device to recover the exhaust as steam to power a steam turbine (called a HRSG). That is essentially three devices to get 500 MW. To get 500 MW out of this ocean idea, you need probably 670+ of these devices (more than exactly 500/.75 given transmission loss and some redundancy). That is a lot of area, and a lot of components that can fail or get eaten up by the corrosive effects of sea water.
These ocean turbine ideas are not alone. The only reason any wind farms ever get built is that congress approved a production tax credit for producing wind energy. Without that, building new wind is simply not viable for any company. The cost to set the things up amortized over some reasonable period consistent with GAAP simply overwhelms the fact that once the things are up and running they cost basically nothing to run. Furthermore, I can not imagine that turbines in the sea would involve as little maintenance as wind turbines.
Bottom line is that nuclear energy is the way to go. With nuclear you know exactly where is the pollution from every nuclear power plant ever produced, except Chernobyl and the US and France produce much safer plants than those Soviet designs. Furthermore, uranium is cheap. Fossil plants are cheaper to produce, but then you have the input price of coal, natural gas, or, in a small portion of the country (Florida, Maine, and Hawaii particularly), petroleum. Operating a nuclear plant might cost somewhere around $5/MW whereas coal might be somewhere around $15 and gas around 8.000 * (price of natural gas, say $2.70 lately) = $21.60.
The turbines will stand 130 meters (426 feet) tall, are to be spread over 65 square kilometers (25 square miles) and supply up to 420 megawatts of power at peak. They'll be just visable from the shore at 8 kilometers (5 miles) distance where they should blur into the sea chop.
Scheduled to begin construction in 2003 and be operationial by 2005 the $600 million project has thus far kept on track and met all impact reviews. It has proven to be particularly economically viable in the ecologically sensitive but rapidly growing Cape Cod area which has unusually high energy rates and a large volume of steady offshore winds.
This isn't as unusual as wave turbines and the like (though it's size is notable) but it is a clever solution to the sound and sight pollution that have been issues with land-based wind farms. While not completely out-of-sight/out-of-mind these will be far enough from folks that they shouldn't be an issue. Furthermore these modern designs have incorporated lessons learned from previous generations and should be wildlife-friendly.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I wonder if you have lost your mind. You can't surf anywhere near these things. Any place that you could then would destroy the natural wave formation of that spot. As far as a rail, that is pretty funny I know it is off the cuff comment but it will never happen for a couple of reasons. First of surfboard, unlike skateboards are foam core, surrounded by fiberglass or epoxy(thin sheets to keep the weight of the board down). Any stike to the surface with a small strike area will cause a ding. The ding will crack the fiberglass letting the water in. This is bad. You will never see rail sliding on surfboard, wakeboards are anouther thing all together. We will not get into them(although they are about the most fun thing on the water outside of surfing and kite surfing..yea think about that!).
Anyway where was I? Ho yea, the only hope these thing could do for surfing is change swell redirection onto a sandbar where the surf sucked. Giving the swell a different direction to pile onto the sandbar or reef. Much like a jetty or an inlet would do. I guess it could also cause different sandbar formations. This I repeat would only be good for places that the surf sucked to begin with, if you put it someplace that had great surf it would cause the same thing to happen and cause the surf to degrade.
Get wet, it will bring your stress down.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
I'll bet this will have the same flaw as wind power and for the same reason.
The flaw is that you don't get more power out than it takes to build the turbine.
Which makes wind turbines an exercise in carbon trading (and an erratic form of power storage), not power generation.
The problem is that the power you get from a turbine is the cube of it's speed.
So hydro and all the steam variants (nuclear, coal, gas, oil) put vast amounts of power onto a single turbine which turns very fast indeed, it generates a lot of power, far more than it took to make the turbine, and people are willing to pay the other costs.
Wind turbines, turning much slower, wear out before they return the energy investment.
Until they find significantly better ball bearings, or better turbine design, or possibly a superconducting breakthrough which might improve a lot of things, wind isn't going to be a large scale improvement.
Ditto these sea-power things,
I'm sure they'll generate power, and like wind they may be adopted widely as carbon trading to meet emissions standards, but they won't generate more power than it took to make them.
Viable sea-power (and possible wind, windmills are great) involves using the waves to push water uphill, and then running a hydro turbine.
until we get that lubrication/turbine/superconducting breakthrough of course... after that all bets are off.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
> This won't solve our energy problems. It will help some though. It is only worth putting tidal plants in areas with large differences between high and low tide
The high tide and low tide height difference is trivial. Just to be absurd, let's assume the height difference is 10 meters. So that's potentially 10 meters of travel from low tide to high tide. Problem is, How much time does it take to move from high tide to low tide? We're talking about literally hours.
So lets look back in our physics book.
1 watt = 1 Newton * 1 Meter per second.
To keep math simple, lets assume that our energy capturing device relies on moving a column of water weighing 10,000 Kg. - converted to force, we have roughly 100,000 Newtons. Also to keep math simple, lets assume the tide moves once every 10 hours (I honestly don't know what's accurate).
10 hours equals 60*60*10 or 36000 seconds.
Our power output is now:
100,000 Newtons * 10 Meters / 36,000 seconds = ~27.8 Watts
or roughly the amount of power required to power a high efficientcy bulb. note that this is assuming 100% efficientcy!
IMHO, 27 watts is negligible considering such a huge column of water being moved.
Now lets look at the energy of each individual wave. To keep math simple, lets assume a moving column of water weighing only 10 Kg. (converts to roughly 100 Newtons of Force). Assume a wave height (amplitude) of only 1 meter. And lets assume a wave travels past every 10 seconds. Now we have:
100 newtons * 1 meter / 5 seconds = 20 watts.
That's roughly the same power output with only 10 Kilograms of water moving! Assuming we could extract the energy with 100% efficiency, were talking about a factor of 1000:1
Please note, I'm only nitpicking. (you could easily nitpick my crude math). I agree that Nuclear energy is underrated, but I felt that this technology should also be defended.
There is a pilot project in Clallam County to install wave power generators from www.aquaenergygroup.com/ of Seattle. More articles here
e nergy.html
http://www.citizenreviewonline.org/nov_2001/makah_ tribe.htm
http://www.greenwave.com/news/issues/sprawl/3775
http://www.nrglink.com/pressreleases/pr120901aqua
Are you sure about that? Microsoft is fianancing the building of 'dwellings' for its Indian workers who then have rent deducted from their pay. Sounds like the start of a 'company town' to me.
The MS Gulag is being built. You just haven't known about it.
First, you consider a new, well run nuclear power plant with on site storage of all radioactive materials. The radiation output of such a plant should be zero. Then you measure the entire world consumption of coal, work out how much radioactive material there would be on average in all of that coal, and you get a large number. Compare the ratio of the two and you get an infinite amount. Everyone would probably agree that this is a very silly way to do a comparison.
So why is the coal radioactive? Sedimentary rock is made up of other rock that has been ground down, and then laid down as sediment - you have a wide mix of minerals in such rock. As a consequence, if you consider a large amount of any sedimentary rock you will find some radioactive material present - this is one of the sources of natural background radiation. So, if you go a step furthur, and consider VAST amounts of coal, oil or even foodstuffs, you will find large amounts of radioactive material. The difference between the radioactivity in a childs sandpit, an ash storage dam at a coal fired power plant and the lowest grade of nuclear waste to merit special storage is that of concentration of radioactive material. It would probably be extemely difficult to distingish the radioactivity in an ash heap from the background radiation.
Now the odd thing about heavy metals that people tend to forget, is that they are heavy. The cheapest form of anti-pollution equipment in a power station is to let the solid particles fall out by gravity - if you look at fifty year old plants they have at least that in place. The major material that is trapped in this process is silicon dioxide, and usually the aim is to trap extremely fine (sub-micron sized) particles of silicon dioxide. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to calculate the size of a uranium oxide particle that would weigh the same as a micron sized silicon dioxide particle - but I can tell you that it is very unlikely to get such a small chunk of material without trying very hard to get it.In short - if gravity seperation catches the light stuff it also gets the heavy stuff.
The situation with British Nuclear Fuels argues the opposite. I can't recall the exact number of hundreds of billions of pounds sterling they recently announced that they had lost - but a quick google search should tell. All of those rare earths used in the equipmnet are not cheap - plus none of the radiation resistant steels or iron based superalloys are cheap. I think you will find that this should read "with a new government subsity." Anyone can make a profit if an outside source keeps shovelling in money. Therin lies the problem - a concentrated source of radioactivity. Comparing this to a beach full of sand or a hundred ash heaps is missing the point. A google search will turn up dozens of incidents where the clueless have done silly things with nuclear waste - things like poorly trained staff stacking all of the drums very close together - so that everything gets nice and hot, and kids finding highly radioactive material form the USA in a dump in Mexico. It's the idiots that say "it's clean" that cause perception problems. We have the stuff, and use the stuff, but we should never pretend that it's clean.You've over estimated the US taxes. According to this web page, taxes only account for 22% of the cost of fuel in the US, but it's 73% of the cost of fuel in the UK. The BBC also had an interesting chart showing the amount of petroleum used by each area of the world.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
No one mentions how harsh the saltwater-air environment is on steel.
Or what happens in storms, if they are built to last will they have reasonable efficiency?
Or the weight of all of the barnacles attached could sink these things.
If windmills loose efficiency from bug debris, what do these things do when encrusted?
At first approximation breaking the waves should
allow deposits to build up behind them as in a snow fence. But even a shallow installation probably won't fill in for decades.
Fuel cells are fine when you are concerned about energy/weight ratios. It isn't ideal when you want high energy storage for low cost. They just don't scale that well. 100x the power is still 20-40x the cost. For large industrial applications 1000+MW for instance, you want something which can store alot of energy cheaply and regurgitate it with little loss.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
I know that you are either Ashcroft or Cheney, but I am betting that you are Cheney.
Back republican, back
Sit right back and you'll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful trip,
That started from a pristine port
Aboard an EXXON ship.
Third mate wasn't much of a sailing man,
But the skipper liked to booze;
So the mate steered the giant oil barge
While the skipper took a snooze.
Large icebergs filled the shipping lanes;
The mighty ship was slowed.
If not for the innovative EXXON crew,
Their oil would not get sold.
The helmsman was heard shouting,
"Clear sailing straight ahead-"
As the sound of the vessel's grounding
Raised the Captain from his bed.
The supertanker hit a reef,
Which pierced it's single skin.
10 Million gallons of oil spilled out,
And a case or two of gin.
No booms, no skimmers, no dispersants,
Not a single contingency;
The oil clean-up effort
Was as primitive as could be.
Now the lawyers call it an Act of God
So the company can't be sued,
And Exxon makes a profit
From the jacked up price of crude.
So now we leave Prince William Sound,
It's shoreline strewn with oil.
Our sights set to the future;
More distant lands to spoil!
This is mild attempt at humor... And this was sent around the BBS's back in 89 after the spill. --- well, I find it humorous...
--Xanlexian
"Congratulations, Boots. Your robot has become self-aware. You're a daddy now." -- Dr. Rho Bowman
this was on slashdot in the last year or two. it is still cool... but a repeat.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
You fool I said rum and coke on the rocks not run the boat on the rocks!?
Dude, it was an April Fool's post from last year. I linked to it as a joke.
Chill.
This tagline is umop apisdn.
" This won't solve our energy problems. It will help some though. It is only worth putting tidal plants in areas with large differences between high and low tide. These places are few and far between. Even when they do put plants in these places, they only produce a fraction of the power of a convetional plant."
This is WAVE POWER, *not* tidal power, and hence can be put anywhere there's a decent ocean swell. The things are modular, can be mass-produced and built up to substantial amounts of power. Ideal for supplying coastal communities.
No it's not a complete solution but it's a very useful and versatile contribution.
"Nuclear power is also cheap. With some new tech, they have gotten the cost of some nuclear power plants below the cost of coal."
Ha ha bloody ha! Remember "energy too cheap to meter"? It may just be true but from the industry's track record of lies, concealment and overoptimism I'd take a lot of convincing.
in the parent posting.
Enron and torpedo joke.
who drove the Exxon Valdez into Bligh Reef... it was a fully licensed, apparently sober, third mate who was qualified according to the US Coast Guard to be in charge of that ship in those waters. The job of guiding the ship from the pilot station to the exit of Prince William Sound at Cape Hinchinbrook should have been a no-brainer but the 3rd mate couldn't manage it despite having been told by a watchstander that the buoy marking the channel was on the wrong side of the ship.
I don't know why everyone assumes that the Captain was responsible for this; Exxon required him to submit a plethora of reports as soon as the pilot disembarked and he went down to his cabin to do it. He was never convicted of any criminal activity or found guilty of any liability. The USCG officers who claimed they could smell alcohol on the Captain's breath were in an environment similar to standing with their noses up your gas tank filler opening; millions of gallons of volatile vapors making it so difficult to breathe that some crew members put Scott Air Packs on to get to the bridge.
Statements like this are like declaring that your father is responsible for your car accident just because he is, after all, your father.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Solar power, meet lunar power. Any way we can harness the moving of the spheres, as well?
Or did they disprove that theory? Dag. Such a pain in my humours this morning, I must have consumption.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Yes! This was recently discussed here on CNN: Whew! Moon nearly blindsides Earth .
cpeterso
Worse, all the working parts are at the water surface, where they get the most pounding and accumulate the most crud. Most ocean systems try to put the important stuff either well above or well below the waterline.
Somebody is going to have to go out in a work boat and fix those turkeys, or tow them in for repair. Not fun.
The captain may have been drunk, or just drinking -- there is a difference.
But he was not on the bridge when the tanker hit. He was off-duty. His possible drunkeness had nothing to do with the disaster.
In the classic captain-is-responsible-even-when-he's-asleep sense, he was blamed, but he was a fall guy. That classic theory gets his bosses off the hook.
Exxon, to save money, had not installed up-to-date navigational subsystems. One of the richest companies on Earth was cheaping it. Hence the hit, hence the breach, hence the still polluted coastline.
Don't blame the poor bastard. Exxon's greed smashed his ship.
Agreed. And still, no one remembers this. After all, it would require getting the news from someone other than Jay Leno.
The big lies keep alive because people are too lazy, frankly, to pay attention. And unscrupulous men and women use this failing to promulgate amazing BS and gain power.
For truly amazing lies that achieve Truth, you can look at Vince Foster, Whitewater, the last election's "victory", the need for a Drug War, the imminent possibility that the communists were going to take us over any second now... sigh. How about UFO's? Most Americans believe they are alien spacecraft, and that the government, who in other cases can't be trusted to regulate commerce, is somehow ultragood at covering up ET.
I want a cookie...
I think this may help to reduce the erosion of the costline, because some of the energy of the waves is converted to electricity. This energy no longer erodes the cost.
Firstly, to debunk a common myth, there is no leadership in the US. Everyone just does what is in their own best interests, and damn the consequences.
/. story a few days ago about 3700 sq. km of Antarctica turning into water. Hell, that's fine with me. I'd like more of the earth to be like California. Keep doing what you are doing folks, enjoy it while it lasts. We haven't even begun to experience the consequences of our grandparent's actions, let alone our own present mistakes. I'm heading for the hills.
The portion of US energy policy I object the most to is not the pollution. It's the fact that we *BURN* OIL. Petroleum is perhaps one of the most useful and versatile chemical in existance, yet we are wasting millions of barrels a day by simply BURNING it. Why? So every soccer mom in the US can drive around by herself in her new Excursion.
Imagine for a second how much better life would be if we had used all the oil we've burned in the last ten years making useful stuff. Everyone could have a padded toilet seat, plastic stuff would be beyond cheap, and and and... ok, look, the point I'm trying to make is that OIL is useful beyond just burning it. And while that may not be very important now, while we have tons of it buried underground, someday we WILL run out.
As crazy as it sounds, oil is NONRENEWABLE. Each and every ounce took thousands, even millions of years to form underground from plant matter from the last great tropical period. Yes, that's right folks, the earth was a giant jungle once, there were oceans in the middle of the US; in fact, most of the land people live on today was UNDER WATER then. What caused it to change? How did the earth change from a tropical paradise to a cold dirty planet like it is now?
Well, a lot of plants grew, and then died, and then more plants grew, and died, and so on, building up into layers miles thick. After a while, most of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere got fixed into sugars and other carbohydrates in the plants and stored in great masses under the ground. Volcanoes erupted, a few asteroids hit, oxygen breathing life appeared, and the Earth got DAMN cold. Glaciers formed and everything got covered up and then luckly, CO2 levels began to rise on Earth again, and it warmed back up.
Then we enter the period of about 2000 years ago, when we found out about coal and started burning it. Then the industrial revolution happened a hundred or so years ago and we started burning oil. Now we burn a shit ton. CO2 levels are rising faster than ever before, and since it's uncontrolled, unnatural, ie: we are burning the shit as fast as we can so everyone can own an Excursion, plants are not growing fast enough to keep up, they are not sucking the CO2 up as fast as we are releasing it.
So the Earth is going to warm significantly soon. It already is--see the
Cool! Amazing Toys.
It's fucks like Enron that exploit things like the California Power Crisis who make electricity expensive. Most energy in the US comes from Hydro, at least in the West, from plants and dams built 50+ years ago. They are a sunk cost, long ago paid for. The reason power costs a lot is that the market is fucked up. There are monopolies involved, corrupt (read: Enron) "distributors", ancient transmission methods, etc. ad nauseam.
We are in a very strange time. I think too many Americans think that everything is "well enough." If you look into the past, technology was something that needed to be driven forward, not for the sake of driving it forward, but the pursuit of something better. Take the railroad industry in the 1800's, always pushing forward with faster trains, smoother cars, etc. Or the space program, pushing towards the moon and eventually succeeding.
And then what happened? 1970, all innovation in the traditional sectors stopped. No amazing new ideas in transportation, energy, or agriculture have come about in the last 30 years! Surely we haven't reached the pinnacle of technology in these areas! It is possible to have trains which go 400mph between cities for 1/10 the cost of AIRPLANES, which are highly inefficient. AIRPLANES are a stupid idea, when it is cheaper and easier to build something on the ground that moves more stuff/people as fast with less fuel. Not to mention safer. And as in this article, there are plenty of new ways to generate electricity.
So what is stifling innovation? What happened in the 1970's that is preventing progress? Well, the biggest corporations of 1970 received control of the US Government. The big automakers, big airlines, big industry (who makes airplanes and road equipment and tractors and stuff), big OIL all started getting stuff back from the government for donations they made. And now, 30 years later, everything in America is EXACTLY the same as is was then (with the possible exception of computer/communications technology), which is just what they wanted.
Before 1970, America was always the "young" country in the world, never afraid to try out new ideas, always on the cutting edge, happy. Now we are consumers only, bored robots, practically a fascist state in our apathy.
What happened? Where did the hippies go? I thought they were trying to change things. Nope, all they did was give the corrupt government power because average America began to fear the more intelligent members of society, college students (there were more than ever then, due to a little thing called the BABY BOOM, the GI Bill, etc.), so they empowered the government to stop them from changing anything to much. Well, they gave the government too much power and while the hippies won the battle, right-wing, conservative, Christian, drug-war-fighting, prision-system expanding America won the war and since 1970, we have been suffering the consequences.
Shit like Sept. 11th just helps matters out for them, because people are more conservative when they fear for their lives, and EVERYONE is SCARED right now even though it wasn't a huge threat to most people's existance. I mean, America is a HUGE country, and even 1000 terrorists couldn't kill 1% of us. And I'll be the first to admit, fuck yes I was afraid. For about a month. Until I realized that the media was blowing this out of proportion. What was once 30,000 deaths became 10,000, then 5,000, then 3,000, and now barely 2,000 people dead. Yet we are afraid, still, because the government won't let us forget, and move on with our lifes, live liberally.
So here we go again giving the conservative military-industrial complex MORE POWER *AGAIN*! We are digging ourselves into a hole and it's all based on us not wanting to give up a single thing because we think everything is as good as it's ever going to get, and if we start to change stuff we are going to fuck everything up.
Fuck that. What happened to the leaders in America? Where did they go? They are all overshadowed now by the culture of Advertising the complex has created. Kids used to worship artists and musicians and writers, now they worship advertisments. Before it was about thinking, now it's about style.
All you old farts reading this, take note. I am 22 years old. I don't know shit about shit. But looking at the kids today, who are younger than me, brainwashed, I feel a slight loss of hope. I am starting to realize that my generation and those a little older than me (the kids of the baby boomers), are the LAST hope. Either we do something, or we choose to ignore it and complain on slashdot the rest of our miserable lives.
NO ONE ELSE WILL EVER CARE. If we give up, it will be too late. It's already set in stone. Kids age 10-16 will not care about progress 6 years from now. They will care about some product that hasn't been advertised yet.
Of course, hey, I don't have any solutions, not yet. I need more time and wisdom. But this won't be my last post. But seriously folks, the fact that we are still subscribing to the same basic sociological ideas we did in the 70s is a bad thing. Especially when Germany, England, Austrailia, hell all of Europe is moving forward. We had a big head start, but this is 30 FUCKING YEARS, and they are beginning to pull ahead. Mark my words, a huge military and industrial economy will not be important forever. We need to stop fighting wars, stealing people's oil and money, being big Conservative bullies and streamline. Or America is going to fall like the Roman empire 2000 years ago. Big, old, and lazy is what we are; changes in computers and communications are not doing enough; we need *REAL* CHANGE in *REAL* PLACES.
Good Luck
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Nowhere in my original post did I write the idea off as crazy. I was just stating that the information provided on the site was little to non.
As for settling for " a few disgruntled surfers, fish that are on drugs, if it meant that Vancouver Island could have some energy independence from the mainland." That's cool, but studies do need to be done.
What about long term effect in water? Fish and other sea creatures like stationary items like this, they make a habitat. What happens when the habitat screws with it's ability to generate energy? Do we kill the habitat or replace the tube?
Have you seen the artists rendition of how this is going to look, do you really want that off your shore?
It's good concept technology and may do wonders in Vancouver Island, but I wonder if this will ever become widespread. Sorry if I sound like some tree hugging hippie, I assure you I am not. I just have questions...
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
eight point six milliUSdollar , now, *that* is cheap.
The Pelamis device is substantially different from other wave systems I have seen. The usual trouble with wave power is that you put a lot of expensive equipment out in the way of the waves, and then a storm comes and the waves get too big and destroy it. Even Lake Michigan gets storms that will re-arrange boulders two yards in diameter; the waters off Scotland or Vancouver are far worse. But there is a lot of power there, so Pelamis designed for survivability in severe storms.
There's something weird about their website, so I cannot give you the URL to go straight to the how-it-works pdf. Navigate to Downloads, and open the bottom one: "'Water Power' magazine article". It's written by someone who never uses one short word where 4 long ones will do, so you might prefer my description:
The Pelamis generator is snake-shaped, made of many rigid steel cylinders jointed together, and floating on the surface. The head end is anchored and the snake swivels around it to keep the head into the waves. As the waves pass, it bends in the vertical plane, roughly following the shape of the waves. Each joint is attached to a hydraulic cylinder, so the bending pumps hydraulic fluid into an accumulator (pressure tank). Fluid from the accumulator runs a hydraulic motor to turn an alternator.
There are ways to tune the system response so it resonates with small waves to extract more power in relatively calm conditions, but as the waves get bigger it goes out of resonance so the energy extracted doesn't become more than the system is designed to handle. In a bad storm, it gives minimal opposition to the waves, so it doesn't get bashed like fixed installations. The weakest part is probably the anchor -- if that drags, the snake could get lost at sea or smashed into the rocks. This is roughly the same chance a ship at anchor runs, except that the snake is a much smaller cross section and so gets less drag, and also you can do things to secure the anchor like pouring concrete that ships don't do because they want the anchor back. OTOH, you don't anchor your ship out where the waves are biggest...
EDF, the French state company that has the monopoly of electricity production and distribution, has operated the Rance tide-power electric plant since 1966.
In these 35 years, turbine technology evolved a lot. However, a few lessons can be learned from the Rance test plant:
From an environmental point of view, let's just notice that the waves and currents are an essential factor of oxygenation. Mess up with it, and you'll end up with stinking, stagnant water à la Venice laguna.
So will this Scottish innovation ever be deployed on a large scale? Don't hold your breath.
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Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Someone needs to make a Star Blazers reference.
according to the World Health Org, only 31 people were killed in Chernobyl.
And approximately that many people are killed every year in coal mining accidents. Nuclear truly is a much safer source of energy.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
... if it's more cost effective in the short term to use mature technology or stimulate new thinking and innovation. Perhaps you know ?
No mention of the fact that you have to dig
:)
/. post after an eon of lurking!]
uranium out of the ground before you can do
all those wonderfully safe and efficient
things with it.
I live in Adelaide, South Australia, and we have
several uranium mines in my State...The companies
operating these mines (US and Canadian) use
sulphuric acid in-situ leaching to extract the
ore, then pump the crap BACK INTO THE
GROUNDWATER!!!
My brother is a surveyor and has visited another
area in Western Australia with a uranium mine,
Roxy Downs...they are allowed to suck 42 MILLION
litres of water PER DAY from the Great Artisian
Basin...People who have lived there for a long
time are noticing the affect this is having on
the water table...
Australia is a dry place, we need our water, our
major river system will be fucked in 20 years
time...i'm glad I probably won't be around when
things start to get really bad.
And don't forget the Jabiluka uranium mine
situated in the heart of some of the most
beautiful countryside in the world; Kakadu,
in the Northern Territory...I spent many a
happy camping trip there, catching barra and
waking up to water buffalo outside my tent
The track record for the company operating
Jabilukais appalling, they have accidents and
leakages all the time!
Our money-hungry short-sighted government and
apathetic australians are as much to blame as
the companies running these mines...but people
like you who spout the virtues of nuclear power
really need to check your head....How can you
justify creating energy for today with waste
that will be with us for 250,000 years!!!
(lifespan of medium-high level radioactive waste)
There ARE alternatives, we should be doing more R&D into Geothermal and Solar, not nuclear.
peace
si [first
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion