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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.
Why do oil company-lovers always have to bash people who don't like oil companies?
I swear, you could have just said that the poster shouldn't have bashed oil comapnies and left at that instead of going off on a tirade about how wonderful the oil companies are and how undeserving they are of protest (especially because that view is misplaced to a LOT of people). You aren't our mother.
Ciao!
I'm not going to resort to a string of insults and profanity but if I hadn't been so shocked at what I'd just read I might have. Microsoft is an asshole of a corporate citizen but it doesn't have _shit_ on oil companies. You are entitled to your opinion but damn! The only damage Microsoft has done so far has been measureable in money and innovation in the tech field. I really despise some of their practices but they've never really hurt anything physically. I'm not an "environmentalist" per say, but I am very concerned about our environment. I am also a Neurologist, before I specialized in neuroscience I had to take a shitload of bio classes, some of them were envi/sci. Let me tell you something: oil companies _do not believe_ that the burning of oil, the stripping of land, oil spillage, the destruction of the habitats of organisms, or any other number of things they do when required, will _ever_ have any negative effects on the world or its species. At least that's their story and they're sticking to it. Believe me, all of those things have consequences; I don't want to get into an arguement about global warming, without even considering that all of those things will have severe negative effects on the environment. I don't believe that we should immediately make the use of oil outlawed but instead of trying to increase our supplies we ought to be trying to figure out a way to get off of it. That wouldn't be good for the wallets of the people running oil companies though, so they fight it with their money. I once read a quote from an oil company exec that said something along the lines of the endangered species protection act (not sure of its actual name) being irritating and that we should get rid of it. That is appalling to me as a scientist. Anyway the point is that while oil companies are not by default horrible, the people who run them currently have no respect for anything except their own wallets. As a reference to this, see: Enron. You may have noticed that name in the news as of late ;)
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
this is actually quite old
En effet..
The Rance plant in France is powered by the tides for more than 30 years...
240 MW maximum capacity (600 millions kWh per year, 68 MW actual capacity)
Very nice piece of french "ingenierie", like the concorde (OK half french, half british...).
Major drawbacks : expensive to build (1 billion $), big impact on the environment.
Some propaganda about it, by the french electricity company (Electricite de France) http://www.edf.fr/html/en/decouvertes/voyage/