Slashdot Mirror
Tidal Power a Reality
updog writes "Here's an interesting story about a city in Norway using an underwater
turbine to generate electricity. It doesn't produce much power (300kW) but maybe it'll pave the way for these types of power plants. Maybe one under the Golden Gate someday??"
Another reason to move our other 2 moons nearer--more tides, more electricity!
Then profit!
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Please not to disturb great sleeping Cthulhu, I like human race to exist!
graspee
Great, so now I don't just look like a troll, I look like an uneducated troll....
What kind of environmental concerns will be raised about this? I remember the project in Canada or whatever (name slips me right now, some big bay) that was being considered for damming to produce tidal power. However, because of the amount of water involved, it would change water levels all over the world. Obviously, this does not involve a dam, but wouldn't the turbine harm aquatic life, and how would the turbines disrupt normal sediment flow?
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Oh sure...all those ships running into the turbines will give it extra spin. Free power, hoozah!
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
it's too bad all these little clean energy projects can't somehow pool their resources into building a few orbital solar satellites.
Tidal power will no doubt make sense in some areas, esp. where political or cultural factors make the increased costs (over fossil or nuclear) palatable & the local coastal conditions are right.
But it seems a better long term solution would be to combine the money and the political will into orbital solar, which has the potential to be cheaper than fossil, cleaner than tidal/wind/ground based solar, etc., and reach just about everywhere on the planet with the same basic technology.
I still wonder why we don't stick a bunch of generators in waterfall streams. The force of a water fall is much more than a normal incoming tide.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
Couldn't the construction of a very large number of these facilities start to increase the amount of force necessary to raise and lower the oceans, and therefore affect the orbit of the moon? Kinda like how the orbit of a planet decreases in radius by a very small amount when you slingshot a space probe around it.
I guess it's a good idea, but what kind of effect would we get if we start putting huge turbines in
the oceans that affects the currents? E.g. Mess with the Gulf stream, and Scandinavia will get a
rather cold climate.
minatures in toilets!
Interesting use of tidal energy, but at $100,000 per household by the end of 2004, this technology has a long way to go. And what about maintainance? Do deep sea diving experts have to come out every time there is a glitch to fix the turbines? Maybe a breakthrough, but many questions need to be answered before I sign my tax dollars up.
Everyone knows that coal and dams are the only way to go. All the green enegy sources are junk science. Because I sit around all day programming a computer I know everything about anything and I know this wont work.
What kind of environmental concerns will be raised about this? I remember the proposed project in Canada at the Bay of Fundy that was being considered for damming to produce tidal power. However, because of the amount of water involved, it would change water levels all over the world. Obviously, this does not involve a dam, but wouldn't the turbine harm aquatic life, and how would the turbines disrupt normal sediment flow?
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Great! Admiral Kirk and crew grab two whales (and baby) to save the planet, they release them .. and the whales get chewed to sushi by the turbines. Probe shakes planet to bits shouting "Hello whales, wakey-wakey!" Ferengi sell souvenir Earth rocks. Profit!
But seriously, there's a lot of power in tides. Nice to see someone actually trying it out.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
but wouldn't the turbine harm aquatic life, and how would the turbines disrupt normal sediment flow?
Harm? don't think about that, just think how much extra energy is generated when fishies slam into the fan blades that drive the turbine.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
Its amazing no one ever thought of this before you!
O wait:
It began modestly in 1757 with one small sawmill. Less than 140 years later, Niagara Falls became the world's leading producer of electrical power.
But wouldn't Kirk crash that stolen Bird of Prey into it when he comes back for the whales? (sorry, it was on last night, had to say it)
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
only cuz you beat me too it, damn you!!!*shakes fist* ~Cyno01
Does anybody know if NetBSD has been ported to this yet?
this is funny mod parent up
For those of you that don't know, this is something that author Marshall T. Savage proposed in his "Millenium Project", a book in which he set out a plan for how human beings can colonize the universe. Though I think he's far-fetched, the plan to build world-wide floating cities on top of hydrolical power-generating hexagons is feasible.
Check out information on the Millenial Project here or here.
This also brings me to the interesting Free State project, mentioned on Libertarian Candidate Rachel Mill's Homepage which links to The Free State Project. Interestingly, Rachel Mills decided to raise money for her run for office by selling pushup calendars of the female Libertarian candidates. Yep, Libertarians stand up for your rights and (some of them) do it while looking good too. A much better way to raise money than what the corrupt Democrats and Republicans do, which is by accepting tacit bribes from special interest groups.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Tidal harness: increases energy production of this square by +2. Built by sea formers (*-1-4), 8 turns.
The thermal borehole is the one I'd really like to see in action, though. 6 energy and 6 minerals is a lot, and could really cut down on our dependency on oil.
Err, yeah...
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I can't do the math?!
Here's one web page on the subject.
Anyway the tidal power finally line is a bit inappropriate.
Them west coast Canadians have been been doing this for a while now...
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
...maybe it'll pave the way for these types of power plants. Maybe one under the Golden Gate someday?
All right, irregardless of the fact that placing a turbine under the Golden Gate bridge would be a hazard to shipping, it would give off enough power to, what, light up Pier 39? BFD.
If you take a look at the article, it says:
<I>The biggest tidal power plant in the world is a barrage across the La Rance river in northern France, in place since the 1960s. It has a 240-megawatt capacity, but Electricite de France has no plans to build new ones.
Canada's Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia has the highest tides in the world, at about 39 feet. Nova Scotia Power's 20 megawatt plant at Annapolis Royal, built in 1984, is the only one in North America, but the company is now focusing more on wind. "There are ecological objections to building more tidal plants along the coast," said Margaret Murphy, spokeswoman for Nova Scotia Power. </I>
What does that tell you? That this new station is bigger than France's entry by !60! Megawatts. And that where the biggest tides are, they decided to go into windpower instead. Why? Let me repeat:
<I>"There are ecological objections to building more tidal plants along the coast," </I>
Before you go wishful thinking, read the article.
Weren't we gonna try to put that 3rd(4th?) one into a stable orbit?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I guess these are for personal use.
The most interesting part about most renewable energies is, once the infrastructure is implemented, how passive energy production becomes. Solar panels just sit there and take energy that would be absorbed into the ground or reflect back to space. Wind and tidal power use two of the most fundamental components of our planets existence as we know it. Maybe geothermal power would be another to consider, or tectonic power.
Either way, what seems a bit ironic about how these energies are collected is how inefficient the collection process actually is. In fact how inefficient we deliberately aim to make it. We use such a small part of an enormous source of energy that it has virtually no affect on the environment. No one every argues that solar panels are going to take up all the sun's warmth and freeze our planet. Squeezing every ounce of energy sources has been the pitfall of almost all previous endeavours. Dams destroy river ecosystems. Coal and oil pollute beyond comprehension.
PS. I'd still rather have nuclear power than oil power.
sig
What kind of environmental concerns will be raised about this? I remember the project in Canada or whatever (name slips me right now, some big bay) that was being considered for damming to produce tidal power. However, because of the amount of water involved, it would change water levels all over the world.
Um, no.
The tide is actually a huge double-lobed bulge around the whole planet. To grossly simplify, two quarters of the planet have higher than normal water levels, and the other two have lower than normal.
Even if you built dams around all continents, the amount of water you'd trap would be about 0.1% of the surface area of the ocean, for a sea level change of one thousandth the height of the _dam_ (not the ocean). This is truly miniscule.
The real problem with dams is that when you build one, you flood a large region of land behind it. For areas that wouldn't normally be flooded (e.g. with hydroelectric projects), this causes environmental upset, and leaches all sorts of crud out of the rocks and soil far faster than rain leaching would (so you get a large spike in, say, mercury levels for a few years). This is unpopular.
Tidal areas are already flooded regularly, so the effects are far less drastic there. All you end up doing is making it very difficult for marine creatures to reach the shore (bad if you built in something like a turtle breeding ground), and change with the timing of the tide cycle (you need to drain the dam when the ocean is near the low mark and fill it when it's near the high mark to generate power, meaning a much more abrubt change in water level for the beach).
'nuf said
But what happens when a whale gets sucked into the turbine?
I can see it now. "Tidal power generator shut down due to injunction by animal rights activists."
I'm not sure why this is even a big deal. As the article states there are bigger and better tidal power stations. The La Rance power station in France has almost 8 times the capacity and is 40 years old.
Nothing earth shattering that I can see.
Slashdot comments can be accurate, highly modded, or posted quickly. Pick two.
Isn't it strange that the publisher of Penthouse (Bob Guccione) is the only celebrity to ever endorse nuclear fusion, which is the only viable solution we are ever going to have to our insatiable lust for energy?
Funding for nuclear fusion is scarce, probably due to energy companies' opposition to anything that could possibly mean free energy. Creating a miniature star with potentially unlimited power -- it can generate as much power as it is fed water to spin turbines -- doesn't sound good to the multi-trillion dollar oil, gas, and coal cartels.
The process for creating a fusion reactor has been mapped out since the 1970s -- however, it would require the equivalent of 7 fission reactors to start the reaction before it can sustain itself, and materials including a very large 3-foot thick shield of lithium.
Nuclear fusion could still be done more easily and cheaper than space-based energy projects.
1. Build tidal power plants, sapping angular momentum from the earth.
2. Days lengthen.
3. Everyone has to work 15 hour shifts (8 in France)
4. ???
5. Profit!
Systems that extract power from wave energy as opposed to tidal energy may be a little less problematic and a lot cheaper to build, albeit also on a smaller scale. The basic idea is to find a waterfront cliff and drill a hole straight down to about 10 feet below the water level, then turn and drill until you encounter ocean. The result is a tunnel with a column of water in it that moves up and down a dozen times a minute or, pushing a fair amount of water and air. Put a turbine in that tunnel in either medium, and you've got power.
Here is a diagram of such a design that uses a prefabricated tunnel rather than drilling. Google will turn up quite a bit about various designs and research.
All crackpots of course. Every good SUV-drivin' Amer'kin knows thar ain't no energy sources other than oil!
God, this is among the best trolls ever written
Perhaps some day we will see free power generation projects, just like we now see free wireless networks, if miniature generators become possible and people who live on the shore have the mind for it.
300 kWh may not be much on its own, but it may be better in the long run to rely on many smaller forms of energy production than a few large, heavily centralized systems that rely on actively polluting fuel (ie, coal, oil, gas, nuclear). A combination of wind turbines, solar arrays, and hydroelectric generators could be enough to take much of the load away from large fossil/nuclear plants, thus reducing the amount of fuel those facilities need to use.
I have this notion in the back of my head of new homes, and many older homes, being upgraded to include some small form of power generation - a solar array, or more likely a small wind turbine, to supply at least a bit of the home's own needs. Since you can still have a grid power system, homes can supplement each other, cutting part of the grid wouldn't necessarily cut all the power.
The expense would be horrid until these devices became more common, and energy companies could make up for losses in pure energy sales by providing maintanence and installation packages - that is, if you're the kind of capitalist that looks for these kind of opportunities.
Think of it as having a network where, instead of one big central server trying to handle everyone's programs and data, each host can handle most of its own data and processing, and the server's just there for the things that the hosts can't handle on their own:)
Opinions and nitpicks about this greatly appreciated...
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
but is anyone else getting the feeling that the whole project is based on poor planning?
The article mentions four or five better ways to generate power but this is how they're going to do it dammit!
Look, I'm all for green power. I like the idea, but it seems to me that the whole thing is in the shitter to start with. The conditions that make it good for power generation make it bad for maintenance. It's possibly the most expensive to implement with little to no extra gain over wind or solar. Where's the payoff?
In short, how is this better than umpteen other green power generation implementations with less start up costs, lower maintenance costs and fewer headaches?
People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.
We must save the northeastern crested bespeckelled jellyfish from these dangerous machines. Is nothing sacred! I mean what could be next? the artic reticulated sand flea? The horror! Just kidding but, they are bound to have some kind of effect on the environment.The trick is to minimalize the amount of disruption to the environment with good engineering. Apparently these type turbines are not as environmentaly impacting as other systems. Some environmental damage will be a given. Millions of birds die from hitting cell towers, but that seems to be the price of convenience.
and place mini turbines in all the toilets of the world and let the coriolus effect do the work for us? Energy flushes. Just think, in Australia they'd have the poles reversed!
Some fish are about to get horribly mangled.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
OK. Now the moaning. The big problem is that people are always thinking in terms of "free" energy at the time of the electricity generation, instead of the Total Cost of Ownership, which includes the construction of the thing. Others have pointed this out, but I wanted to focus on the fallacy of romanticizing electricity generation with free fuel.
The second thing is that with this, the bulk of whatever environmental damage occurs will be largely invisible. Still it might be very limited.
Again, let me say that I am not against this project. I hope that this sort of thing leads to better technologies that are eco{nomically,logically} rational. We shouldn't expect a new thing to reach that at such an early trial. But again, I wish that people wouldn't romantize electricy generation based on "free" fuel sources.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
OSLO, Norway -- In a novel use of clean energy, the world's most northerly town will soon be the first to get electricity from a sub-sea power station run on tidal currents tugged by the moon.
Gigantic forces in the oceans -- waves, currents, and tides -- have often proved too costly or awkward to harness, compared to wind or solar power, in global efforts to cut reliance on nuclear power or on fossil fuels blamed for global warming.
Starting in late November or early December, however, a tidal current will start turning the blades of a windmill-like turbine standing on the seabed near Kvalsund at the Arctic tip of Norway.
"We will be the first in the world to use tidal currents to generate electricity to be fed into the local grid," said Harald Johansen, managing director of Hammerfest Stroem.
Other unorthodox sub-sea experiments to generate power from tidal currents from Australia to Britain have not gotten to the stage of selling power. All the technologies mark a shift in traditional methods of exploiting the tide. Tides have previously been tapped for use in power plants in France, Canada, and Russia by building barrages to trap water in artificial lagoons at high tide. When the tide goes out, gravity sucks the water through turbines to generate electricity.
But giant damming projects are out of fashion because they can damage the ecology of rivers and coastlines. Seabed turbines, by contrast, are silent and invisible, and fish can swim around them without getting sliced up.
"Of all the renewable energy technologies, ocean energy is probably the one in the earliest stages," said Mark Hammonds at the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris. "Many projects have proved to be too costly."
Tidal power exploits the gravitational pull of the moon, and to a lesser extent the sun, on the oceans as the Earth spins. The seas rise and fall in a cycle of 12 hours and 25 minutes and can cause sweeping currents along the seabed at the same time, like the ones seen off the north Norway coast.
LIGHTS FOR 1,000 HOMES
The Norwegian sub-sea turbine will have a tiny capacity of 300 killowatts and is due to expand to 20 mills from 2004, giving enough power for perhaps 1,000 homes.
Hammerfest, with 11,000 inhabitants, calls itself the world's northernmost town. Johansen reckons the project there has cost 50 million Norwegian crowns (US$6.7 million) so far and will cost 100 million by completion in 2004.
High oil prices and pledges to curb emissions of greenhouse gases as part of the Kyoto pact to limit global warming, blamed on emissions from burning coal or oil, are helping make green technologies like tidal power more attractive despite their drawbacks.
Other systems to tap the oceans range from giant snakelike tubes that generate power when rocked by waves to machines that extract power from the contrast between warm surface waters and chill temperatures at ocean depths. But experts are uncertain about the potential, especially because of sub-sea maintenance costs. Storms have wrecked many experimental ocean power stations.
"We need to harness all low-impact renewables we can develop. But offshore wind is more competitive and solar has more potential," said Greenpeace spokesman Truls Gulowsen.
The biggest tidal power plant in the world is a barrage across the La Rance river in northern France, in place since the 1960s. It has a 240-megawatt capacity, but Electricite de France has no plans to build new ones.
Canada's Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia has the highest tides in the world, at about 39 feet. Nova Scotia Power's 20 megawatt plant at Annapolis Royal, built in 1984, is the only one in North America, but the company is now focusing more on wind. "There are ecological objections to building more tidal plants along the coast," said Margaret Murphy, spokeswoman for Nova Scotia Power.
All the plants are tiny. Western-style nuclear generators typically have a capacity of 500 to 1,000 megawatts and can be counted on for reliable power generation, unlike many renewable energy sources.
QUIXOTIC POWER?
In Norway, Hammerfest Stroem reckons that building tidal turbines could become a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It notes many experts used to dismiss windmill parks, now widespread in countries like Denmark, as quixotic.
In Kvalsund, the water flows at about 8.2 feet per second apart from a pause at high and low tides. By contrast, windmills are useless in calm weather and have to be built to withstand hurricane force winds.
Solar power is a non-starter in winter in Hammerfest, where the sun sets for about two months in mid-winter. The town was the first in Europe to get street lighting almost 100 years ago.
But costs of the electricity are initially likely to be three times that of typical hydro-generated electricity in Norway. Tidal power will be added to the mix of electricity in the local grid and consumers will be obliged to swallow the cost.
The tidal turbines weigh about 200 tons including the base and are well below the keels of passing ships. They turn to face the tide when the currents change direction. The turbines are designed to be maintenance-free for three years, but divers can go down if needed.
British-based Marine Current Turbines, which plans to test a similar tidal current system off Devon in southern England next year, says that maintenance could be a problem for Hammerfest. "When you have strong enough currents for tidal energy generation, there are few slack tides when divers can work," said Peter Fraenkel, the group's technical director.
Marine Current Turbines' design, which sticks above the water, allows the turbines to be winched up to the surface. "The size of this resource is not understood," he said. He said that a British study a decade ago estimated that the eight most promising sites off the British coast alone could generate one-fifth of Britain's electricity.
Copyright 2002, Reuters
science has been making waves.
-- james
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/on-line/fusion/rea ctors.asp
It's used as the neutron-absorbing material in a closed heat-exchange loop, and a 1m thick blanket of molten lithium is needed to capture 100% of the neutrons, and for just about everything else, too.
once again, jews, asians, blacks, arabs, all covered. but you fall short my bigot friend. you did not insult a Single mexican.
keep trying though. your post shows potential.
Only $13.4 million and it will power "perhaps 1000 homes". Wow, that's only $13,400 per home... couldn't they buy electricity from the grid for a lot longer than the expected working life of machinery on the ocean for a lot less money? Would you shell out $13,400 now for free electricity for the next 10 year? Or would you be better off putting the $13,400 into a CD and using the interest to pay your electic bill?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Yes, I always knew Tide is the most powerful.
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And be sure to try out Tide Kick(R), the latest addition to the Tide family of fabric care products. Tide Kick is a multi-tasking measuring cup and pretreating device all rolled into one.
Sheeeeittttt - who needs this kinda hair-brained liberal scheme when yuh kin jus' rape the good earth for dead dinosaurs - why'd y'all think God killed them off anyway? He was thinkin' of the poor oilman! Now we're just about to do it right by drilling the hell out of that country Alaska. Or ya can always go with nucular energy - clean'n'safe. Jeez you greens git on my nerves. The American people has spoken - they likes me and I got me no oppysition now. I say fu*k the future and profit now - it's the Republikin way!
He also forgot to insult the homos
I am ashamed to say that the parent post offended a affirmative action negro who just stole a more qualified White man's job! You cruel bastards! Also adding insult to injury, the post also insulted his bleach-blonde fat race traitor slut wife! You narrow minded bigots, when will you become more enlightened?
On How Stuff Works If you didn;t get it.
Done in France in 1960 !y age/usine /retour-usine.html
It's called ""Usine maremotrice de la Rance".
http://www.edf.fr/html/fr/decouvertes/vo
While the Bay of Fundy may have the greatest tidal range, British Columbia has many places that are perfect for this type of turbine design. I can think of several spots among the islands halfway up Vancouver Island, where the tide runs 7+ knots almost every day, like clockwork, with just a few minutes slack during the change -- around Stuart Island, for example. These places are close enough to be wired into the grid, and if not, local communities could be served.
"Maybe one under the Golden Gate someday??"
Not for the next 2 years, at least.
You're both incorrect.
The gravitational pull of the earth is the source of power.
The water generating the power travels niether through the river nor over the falls. The water is pulled by gravity through pipes called penstocks to the turbines.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Just one more excuse for the envroweenies to twist knots in their knickers.
"The Sky is falling! The Sky is falling! We've put too much drag on the Moon!"
"Sight Seeing in California for Mexicans"
- to busy working the fields and hanging out at the Post Office...
"Gay Automotive Repair - How to get stiff at the Garage"
Now in the month of Ramada (sounds like a hotel), the animals in the fields are safe again... Since no longer can the men fuck their camels and sheet.
Islam and Western culture both glorify violence... But they do it for God, we do it for entertainment.
Alaha was a FAG... a FAG I tell you... He was butt-fucked by a donkey.
So, tidal power is really just harnessing the moon's gravitational pull on the oceans.
But, doesn't conservation of energy suggest that "we can't get something for nothing"?
By taking power away from the moon's orbit, aren't we just accelerating the decay of that orbit?
Sure, we've got the power now, but what good will it be when the moon comes crashing down to KILL US ALL!
*runs and hides*
From the article:"The Norwegian sub-sea turbine will have a tiny capacity of 300 killowatts..." and "The biggest tidal power plant in the world is a barrage across the La Rance river in northern France,... It has a 240-megawatt capacity"
That makes it smaller than the French plant by 239.7 megawatts, unless I'm missing something here.
This link is actually to goatse.cx!
He's used the howstuffworks frame in order to post a link to goatse.cx under the howstuffworks domain...
damn u...
Oh no!
They are taking power from the tides? The tides are generated from the gravitational pull of the moon. Taking power from it reduces the orbit of the moon, inevitably making it crash into the earth. Doom Doom Panic Panic.
I wonder how many exawatt-years that would be until it gets that far though...
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Glad to see us Americans aren't the only dummies in the World.
In order to generate a kilowatt hour it would be necessary to
displace33000 cubic ft at %100 eff. assuming a tidal effect of
1 ft per hour. 1000 watts divided by a hrspwr [776 foot-lbs.]
times 550 times 60.. It would require a tidal pool 10 times
larger than the town it was designed to power just to supply
a minimum power per unit..
.
A system infinitely more effective is the "Wave Rocker"..
which has been going nowhere in the decades since its
inception. There are two types;
1) Tethered to the sea floor, as the waves come in, a float
rises & sinks with each wave. The tether cable turns a generator
as the float moves up & down.Its as though one ties a boat to a
pier, when the wave hits the boat it will snap the line if it has no give.
2) a boat whose length is eqal to 1/2 wavelength of the waves.
As the boat rocks in the surf, a bowling ball rolling around on the
deck pulls a lanyard wraped around the generator shaft.
.
Oilmen will tell you the floats collect barnacles & its costly
maintaining them. Anti barnicle paints containing capsicum
[chilli peppers] keep the little suckers at bay however.
.
Speaking of oil interests, how the hell the republicans could take
any seats in congress after Dubyah blew 10 terabucks in
the stockmarket I'll never know. He blew 600 million dollars of
investor money just trying to screw Martha Stewart,[ can't say
he's a cheap date but it wasn't his money.] They want Martha to
roll over on that Cancer doctorWelasec[?] because cancer
protects oil profits from nuclear power.
Enron is the Vampire of the stock community, the only way it can
be killed is by the government stopping trading on this stock.
It owns immensely profitable pipelines that replace revenue as
quickly as they can gamble the money away. If any of those
gambles were allowed to come in it would have doubled the
stock value. Enron deliberately created thousands of jobs
which were all trashed by Dubyah when he demanded Enron
cease functioning.
.
He blames the CEOs who have created America's wealth
& cites $100 million dollar bonuses. Personally if I were a CEO
& I brought in a billion dollars in new business a %10 bonus
wouldn't be excesive, it would be mandatory. Never having
worked a day in his life since the Skull & Bones made him
a "made Man"; being reimbursed for ones labors in a country
where life is measured in dollars doesn't mean anything to him
SPQR
Actually that reminds me. Popular Science did a story about putting a tethered turbine into the Gulf Stream. Wonder what happened to that?
BTW wouldn't these low power water turbines be of more benifit to small costal villages in third-world countries?
The source of this power is the Sun. It evaporates the water, and provides the heat to drive convection to lift the water vapor to a higher altitude, where it condenses into rain. The turbines you mention harvest the potential energy of this water.
Lets do what the AI machines were doing in The Matrix. Since most people here love the movie so much, we'll start with them.
Think about it though. If we don't really "grow" humans (contrary to what was in the movie) for power consumption and just what we have, then the rate of power consumption will be declining with the more people we burn. After a while we can actually start closing plants. Once we get to more stable point, like pre-1900s population, polution will surely be low enough to appease the envionrmental loonies. Maybe by that time, it will be socially acceptable to have doube the number of kids so that half can be used for power generation.
Where it comes from is just pretense. Its all about obeying the law. The all powerful second law of thermodynamics, that is.
The source of power is the dispersal of coalesced energy. The Sun has a lot of it (most of it having coalesced so far as to become matter), so its chemical process is designed to disperse it quickly. This leads to the processes you describe, as our planet has been infected by this energy from the sun.
As if we didn't have things like "properties of matter" to overcome in our quest to disperse energy - we also have to deal with the stuff from the sun.
Obviously this technique is just another one to add to the list of things that aid us in our work - the work that humans are uniquely qualified to do and which sets us higher than all of the rest of the creatures on earth: waste energy.
Now if you'll excuse me, I somebody just turned off one of the lights in the house, so I gotta go turn it back on. Plus, either the air conditioner or the heater just shut off; I need to go figure out which and get that up and running again.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I saw someone mentioned this as a joke, about fish getting mangled.
When my aunt was in college they went just west of here into Minnesota to check out the environmental impact of a large windmill farm (interesting stuff, sitting in Minnesota, controlled in California, owned by Enron in Texas). There were large numbers of bats running into the blades. I dont remember what they did to curb this, although I think it involved increasing the rotational speed. Any way, bet the same effect will happen with these.
Bet thatll teach Flipper not to hang out near the shore.
Damn that's clever. It is, in fact, goatse. Normally, I don't trust AC's saying "It's goatse!" so I'm warning signed in. That's pretty damn good though. I caught it by reading the address when I hovered over, but you almost got me. If the url was a little more obscured, that would be totally inpenetrable.
Anybody know of a way to manualy enter a domain to block images from in Phoenix? Having to go there and right click the image to not have to see it again... it's like killing Hitler as a baby, only with gaping assholes. *shudder*
Teleported energy.
We've already had this reported on here. The guys who teleported the laser said that they cant do matter transmission, but they can do energy.
So send up a satellite, get one of these little teleporty things going, and teleport the power straight into the grid. If its off a bit, it should earth itself, and because its getting from the satellite to earth without going through the space in between, it shouldnt fry anything in its way.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
A lot of work is being done in Japan, India etc. on this . A test project in India genereaes 500 KW. (http://www.eren.doe.gov/consumerinfo/refbriefs/nb 1.html )
Isn't this almost a perpetual motion machine? I really haven't learned much about thermodynamics, or whatever branch of science says you can't have these, but if the rotation of the turbine is created by the rotation of the moon, and there is no energy going into making the moon rotate around the earth, it just seems like you're getting something out of nothing. Of course one day the moon will spin out of earths orbit, and even if we do pull it back the sun will eventually explode, so it's not forever, but it seems close. Somebody tell me where I've gone wrong before my head implodes please :)
The turbine is driven by a water current, not a tide, so it's not "tidal power". Yes, the current is driven by the tide but it's still a current (the article calls it a "tidal current"). Tides are the vertical movement of water, current is the horizontal movement of water. I just thought you all might appreciate this chance to expand your nautical knowledge. :)
My tide and current book for San Francisco Bay says the average peak tide at the gate is about 4.5 knots, which if I did my math right is about 7.6 feet per second, a little less than the one in Oslo.
I think though that Norway has many fjords, which are rather long, where they can line up a lot of thise turbines one after the other. Whereas the 'Gate is a just a relatively short constriction. They plan to build 20 of these things in Oslo just to generate enough power for about 1000 homes. I don't think there's 20 good places for a turbine like this in the Bay, so I'm not sure it would be very practical for us. Dunno, but that's my idle speculation for the day. :)
When quoting figures for the cost of power generation, it's always discussed with respect to, in units of kW/hr. And this article states the cost very clearly -- 30 to 35 cents, or about three times typical for Norway.
around a magnetar and I think you'll get a lot of current out of there.
While solar energy is a very promising option, there are a couple of catches that make it less ideal than advertised:
If your beam intensity is less than, say, the average intensity of sunlight, you might as well build photovoltaics or a solar heat engine on the ground, and save the cost of a satellite and receiving station. If your beam intensity is large enough to be useful (many times the intensity of sunlight), then it will cook birds that fly through it, muck royally with local weather (maybe even to the point of starting a local hurricane), and so forth. While these drawbacks aren't catastrophic, they have to be planned for.
There is no danger of the beam wandering and frying the landscape. It's generated by a host of phase-locked emitters - synced to a transmitter in the middle of the receiving patch. No transmitter to sync to, and the emitters on random phases send energy in all directions, and most of it would have a hard time hitting *earth*, much less your backyard.
Not horribly short, but you're going to have to amortize the cost of the satellite over a decade or two before something wears out or micrometeorites turn your panels/mirrors into confetti. A solar power satellite costs a _lot_ to lift, and power is cheap. My own back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest it costing 10 times more to lift than would be generated from electricity sales over a decade even with very favourable assumptions (100 W wall-plug output per kg of satellite, $10,000/kg to build _and_ launch, $0.10/kw*hr sale price of the electricity).
In summary, solar power will need several technological breakthroughs (or an order of magnitude increase in terrestrial power cost) before being competitive.
The breakthroughs are on the horizon, though. High-efficiency photovoltaic cells are coming on to the market, and thin-film cells can already be bought over the counter. Combine this with aluminized mylar concentrating mirrors, and you might have a satellite cheap enough to lift.
My money's still on fusion, though.
How is this news? There is a 240MW tidal generator that has been in continuous commercial use in France since 1966.
It's the "Usine Maremotrice de la Rance" (tidal generator of the Rance river) near Saint-Malo in Brittany.
It has been in service for 36 years and is still the only industrial-scale tidal energy generator in the world. It is also the most visited industrial site in France (300,000 tourists annualy).
More info at http://membres.lycos.fr/larance/main1.html
Say you had two massive, extremely sturdy poles which were joined together with a hinge. Let's say the hing was really a generator, and that this generator had an extreme gear ratio such that it would take thousands of tonnes to move opposite ends of the poles closer together. You just wedge the poles into something really strong like a tide or a fault line, etc...
Could we not gain a lot of energy from this technique?
Isn't it strange that the publisher of Penthouse (Bob Guccione) is the only celebrity to ever endorse nuclear fusion, which is the only viable solution we are ever going to have to our insatiable lust for energy?
Funding for nuclear fusion is scarce, probably due to energy companies' opposition to anything that could possibly mean free energy.
Actually, this is wrong on pretty much all counts.
Fusion reactors are very big, and very expensive. This is why funding for fusion projects tends to get cut when economic belts are tightened. This is also why fusion energy will never be free - your plant has yearly costs (maintenance, and the amortized cost of building the plant over a reasonable payback window). These costs are passed directly on to the consumer, in the form of a nonzero price for electricity. The same happens with things like hydroelectric and fission power - the cost of the fuel required is low (or zero, for hydroelectric). You're paying for the plant/dam.
Lastly, the fact that electricity never will be free (due to the cost of facilities for producing/distributing it) means that a) there will be no magic free-energy solution, and b) our lust for energy had damned well *better* be sated, because otherwise we'll be awfully disappointed when we find out there isn't a free (beer) supply.
Oh, and if anything, I'd expect the big fossil fuel companies to be the strongest _supporters_ of alternative power sources. They're on top of the market now, and as soon as fossil fuel supplies wane and prices go up (or taxes on fossil fuel emissions rise), they'll want to be right there ready to sell the alternatives.
The process for creating a fusion reactor has been mapped out since the 1970s -- however, it would require the equivalent of 7 fission reactors to start the reaction before it can sustain itself, and materials including a very large 3-foot thick shield of lithium.
Startup power isn't really an issue. The real problem is that producing fusion isn't as simple as building a big donut and watching it go. Fusion ignition is harder than anyone thought 30 years ago, and the engineering problems involved with building a useful fusion reactor are orders of magnitude harder that we'd thought as well. Progress is (slowly) being made, but it's going to be a while, and it's *not* going to be cheap.
In summary, I'd suggest doing a bit more reading about fusion and power generation in general before extolling it's virtues as a cure-all.
127.0.1 goatse.cx(or whatever)
Have they ever managed to keep the plasma torus stable enough in a tokamak to use it? From what I understood, this was one of the main problems with research tokamaks, which was preventing the project from going further.
I've heard varying stories as to what the limiting problems are with current reactors (and all are probably true). However, an interesting development re. turbulence was made relatively recently. A group installed sensors and correction magnets on a tokamak, and suppressed the small irregularities in the containment field that turbulence produced. The result was much better confinement.
I don't have a link handy, but it might even have been on Slashdot many months ago.
My personal suspicion is that better materials will provide a big boost. I'm drooling over what nanotubes will do for anything that involves strong magnetic fields - they're the next best thing to superconducting, and their tensile strength means you can run an extremely strong magnet without worrying about it tearing itself apart. Both high density and long confinement times are much easier to achieve with a stronger magnetic field.
How about this?
Free Hans!
Remember the tho main effects (in the VERY long run, of course, though they can be measured right now by atomic clocks) of tidal power plants
1. They slow the earth rotation (which is quite normal, since they oppose the movement of tides, therefore making the earth slightly more "coupled" to the moon). No kidding.
2. They move the moon slightly away from the earth (slowly, but every year) for the same reason. You can also deduce that by another way, which is the conservation of momentum in the couple earth-moon.
Those issues were raised in their time when France built its tidal power plan on La Rance, near the town of Saint-Malo. A lot of people said that "the consecutive slowdown of the earth could never be measured". It has been. And, of course, nothing will revert if the power plant is - or rather when it will be - later stopped.
This is of course not a concern for us, but over the course of mankind as a species, it is. It is clear that just for energetic reasons there is no reasonable hope for the whole 6 billion people of mankind to emigrate anywhere else, even if we had an idea of where that "anywhere else" could be. So let us be careful with these experiments.
I wonder if the La Rance power plant could be in the future bombed by a decision of the UN or the NATO, just because it represents a (very very very very very) long term ecological menace
This idea wouldn't be all unlike the underwater "jet engine" that the Red October had....
Some readers might not know that there is a successfully working tidal power facility in the Bay of Saint-Michel in France since 1966. Its output is 240MW.
I found some pictures on the web.
This sig is a true statement, but I cannot prove it.
This is different. The la Rance generator uses dams, and floods the turbines (Probably both on incoming and outgoing tides). This uses underwater "windmill" (tidemill?) to generate power. No dams needed.
J.
Why would the Norwiegians care about aquatic life? They've been violating international treaty on whaling for decades, along with Iceland and Japan.
Not that I'm usually a tree-hugger, but it strikes me as hypocritical that the Scandinavians come across as looking good for pursuing "alternative" energy, when in fact that pursuit is motivated by profit margin and a scarcity of fossil fuel.
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!
I'm a bit surprised to read this here, since this is defenitely not a recent development.
In the Netherlands they also use the river water to get electricity from. This the same kind of system: large masses of water move a turbine. I think that at the coast of Denmark they also have a plant like this norwegian one.
In france the use the difference between high-tide and low-tide to generate quite a lot of energy. The difference between tides is in the range of 10 meter s or something. This plant has also been there for years already.
Nevertheless it is still a nice and clean way of getting energy. One doesn't mess up the country sides with fields of solar-cells or wind-turbines.
- maybe better not to put them i a harbor
The power of waves is also being used in some countries. While it doesn't generate as much power as tidal dams do, it still makes sense for smaller coastal towns, because the plants are not too expensive.h tmlu/wavint.html
They basically work by building a large (concrete) tube a few neters into the water right at the coast. As the water rises and falls with each wave, air is pushed out of and sucked into the other end of the tube, where a turbine is installed that generates power with an air current in both directions.
Obviously, another disadvantage is having the ugly plants right on the shore.
Infos and other methods of using wave power here:
http://europa.eu.int/comm/energy_transport/atlas/
The one advantage that tidal power has over all other current sources of energy is that it is the only energy source that is guaranteed to be in that same location every day for the next few thousand years (okay, next few hundred million years, but I'm speaking in current human social terms), unless we blow up the moon into little bits (like they did in "The Time Machine").
Oil, coal, gas and uranium are in limited volumes at the sources we find them, and will be gone when those sources are used up.
Where it is windy today might turn into barely a breeze over years or decades depending on weather pattern changes.
The sunny place you put a solar panel today could change to mostly cloudy all year in a few years to decades also.
Only the tide is immune from all near term natural and man made changes (short of intentionally blocking waterways just to screw with the location of a tidal power plant).
If they can figure out ways to make this economical, it will be a much more stable energy source than all other earth based sources combined.
One other thing to consider is that the one constant bottleneck in all of these forms of energy (except for direct solar, not "boiling water" solar) is the turbine. Increase the efficiency of turbines and you can get more energy out of all the current power plants by doing retrofits. It seems like this should be the highest priority in energy research.
YES YES YES!
Build it, and run it, until we get rid of leap year!
-- Terry
Nobody is ever happy with power generation. No matter what you pick, there are always critcs:
--Coal/Oil/Natural Gas: Air pollution
--Nuclear: Nuclear waste
--Hydroelectric: Rivers need to be dammed
--Geothermal: Releases lots of sulfer and arsnic
--Solar: Not cost effective
--Wind turbines: Kills birds
--Tidal: We'll think of something
These do not rotate any fast; which is also an trend in windmills.
Its more efficient this way.
The article mentions that "fish can swim around them without getting sliced up".
In the last years there were more experiments with tidal and wave energy. Were. Most experiments were halted abruptly with a nice storm.
There seems to be a gaping hole in that logic.
Yes.... yes... you guessed it...
SOLAR PLATE MERCURY!
*bows*
=)
(Isn't there something about microwave power transmission, like it doesn't use the heat->water->steam method of power generation? At least that's what I've heard...)
Alari
I use Windows... like a two dollar wh.. why don't I just go ahead and not finish that sentence.
"Tidal power a Reality": it is an old reality as EDF already built an tide powered power plant in France in 1963.e /retour-usine.html (or Google translated)
See http://www.edf.fr/html/fr/decouvertes/voyage/usin
http://www.edisonpowerprogramme.com/pz/din.htm There is a British station that uses water turbines and stores electricty taken from off the grid by pumping water up to a reservoir and then releases it at peak times by letting it flow back down, driving a turbine. I have always thought it was a pretty neat solution - did a project on it when I was a kid. I think the upper reservoir is a natural glacial lake and all they had to do was dig a few tunnels, install the pumps and line some stuff with concrete. I remember it as being pretty impressive when I visted it. Link doesn't give much information I'm afraid but has some basics and a couple of pictures.
I remember crashing comets into Mars in SimEarth too:-).
But the proposals for satellite solar power involve wide, low power beams, not enough per square meter to cause a fire or even burn the skin.
The beam, with many times the energy per square meter than unamplified sunlight, hits a large photovoltaic receiver.
Hanging out under the beam would not be good for you, but it would not be instantly fatal, either, and as another poster pointed out, a simple fix would be to turn off the transmitter if the ground station was not receiving the beam.
One can point out greater dangers involved in hangliding around windmills or diving near tidal generators: the best rule is 'don't do that' (or as Ogg said to Mog: fire is hurts!), but like the others, & unlike nuclear & fossil, no toxic exhaust or poisonous waste is made.
As far as a rogue power taking over a beam station, simply staying indoors would be a decent protection until anti-satellite weapons took out the very large target.
More: The World Needs Energy from Space
A thermal borehole in action.
losing "most of what you send" is less of a problem. In fact, the inexhaustible nature of the power + the lack of cost for real estate are just two of the advantages orbital solar has over earth based.
However, from my reading of the subject, most of the loss is actually in the conversion from AC/DC to microwave, so again, having an inexhaustible power source at the sending end makes this much less of a problem, & also suggesting that the sending end might try other methods than conversion to AC/DC. If you have links discussing loss during transmission, I'd be most interested.
In any event, research into wireless energy transmission is steadily improving in efficiency and making SPS more and more attractive (Bright Future for Solar Power Satellites.
Further, most of the 'green' power methods involve extracting only a fraction of the available power (windmills shut down in high winds, for instance, so I think my original point stands.
And it looks like fusion will need to use He3 to be efficient in the near term.
Long run, better forms of fusion may turn up, but it seems to me that if one assumes the tech. to make fusion efficient, one can also assume the tech to make SPS efficient, at which point why bother making your own little suns when you got a real big one for free?
The process for creating a fusion reactor has been mapped out since the 1970s -- however, it would require the equivalent of 7 fission reactors to start the reaction before it can sustain itself, and materials including a very large 3-foot thick shield of lithium.
Seems like your already well over the cost of a comparable solar satellite before you even get the reaction started, much less finding enough He3 to keep it going, not to mention the NIMBY problem when you tell folks you just need to build 7 new nuke plants to get it going...
I clicked through the link and i almost laughed my ass off when i read the headline: "Arctic town to get offbeat tidal energy" when did oslo become an arctic town? i laughed even more when the article stated: "..the most northerly town in the world..." I live 5 hours by car north of oslo.. (the summers aren't that bad.. we get 25-30 C temperatures). The guy who wrote that article hasn't payed alot attention in geography class....
Maybe with a magic spell, but then why not just make a self powering coffee pot?
having a poor memory significantly shortens your life span, or make you signnificantly more attractive to the opposite sex, then this is not a darwinian natural selection process....
So i would say unfounded.
Shave the Whales!
Seriously, what happens if some sort of large mamalian marine animal walks (er, swims) into a tidal power generator?
And what effect does this have on coastal erosion (good or bad)?
Obviously it's going to have some environmental impact. I'd rather that we spend extra time analyzing it now then paying the price for it later.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
If the url was a little more obscured, that would be totally inpenetrable.
I think with a ringpiece that size, he's going to remain pentrable no matter what you do to the URL, and that for some time to come.
There is a perfect location, potentially generating 5000 MW (Sorry for the pdf) on the Minas Basin of the Bay of Fundy between Cape Split and Parsbarro. These are the highest tides in the world, up to 16 metres.The entrance to the basin is approximately 8km wide, and could be dammed relatively easily.
On flows "The currents exceed 8 knots (4m/s), and the flow in the deep, 5 km-wide channel on the north side of Cape Split equals the combined flow of all the streams and rivers of Earth (about 4 cubic kilometres per hour)."
Back to where I started, Environmental impact: There would be huge disruptions to the intertidal zone, where much of the life of the bay lives. Siltation would be a major problem. The Petticodiac river in Moncton, NB, was partly dammed by a causeway in the early 1960's. Since then, the river downstream from the causeway has filled in with mud as it no longer gets flushed twice a day, and no longer gets the full effect of the spring runoff. Many of the rivers running into the Bay of Fundy are muddy. Will that settle into the basin? There are no longer any Salmon going up the Petticodiac river, largely due to the causeway. What effect would a huge dam/causeway have?
Any power generation will have environmental effects. It comes down to a choice as to which effects we choose to live with.
Michael (working at a nuke plant on the other side of the bay)
Though not Tidal Energy. There is a (1990 - used to be ?) a working 1.1MW/150kW oscillating water column power plant using Wave Energy near my home town in India. There seems to be some details here. It was a research project done by IIT, Madras. A lot of details, pictures etc. can be found here.
Hydro power is SOLAR power. If it weren't for the sun, all the water in the world would be evenly distibuted all over (well, neglecting tides, which don't matter for this). There would be no potential difference. Solar energy heats up water, making it go up into the atmosphere until it cools off and falls to earth again, but at a higher level, creating a potential difference. Gravity doesn't add engergy to the system, the Sun does!
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Really smart! And what happens in about 2 trillion years when the moon comes crashing into the earth because those Oslo energy suckers have to have electricity?
As others have pointed out, the Fundy tidal power project has been on line for something like a decade, and it is quire large.
Using tidal power for mechanical energy has been around for centuries. Here in Boston we have three meter tides; at the time of the revolutionary war we had mills driven by impounding tidal water in the Back Bay. Eventually the bay became so noxious with sanitary and industrial wastes that it was landfilled to make the neighboerhood of the same name, which is the only part of Boston with streets in a regular grid layout.
Boston and the Bay of Fundy are part of a the same physical oceanographic system where the amplitude of tides are increased by resonance. There are similar places in southwest England and in Scandanavia with large tidal amplitudes. I'm sure that many places with a tidal amplitude of two or three meters or more have a history of tidal mills.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
ha! I just found another story from Cosmicomics online. It's damn funny, and somewhat geek-oriented. Worth a read: How Much Shall We Bet?
In Soviet Russia, posts moderate you!
They'll probably setup a special tax for the construction of this thing.
They'll probably call this the "Slatibartfast tax".
Off-topic, of course - I just have one thing to say about this: http://www.zompist.com/libertos.html
When we eventually spread into the solar system, I can think of a few good places to put tidal power plants.
Some of the moons of Jupiter might make sense.
Io, with it's extreme temperatures and tidal gradient would make a fine geothermal and tidal power location. Europa, has more than enough tidal energy, but likely is too unstable (though Io is not stable either, come to think of it).
Ganymede, would be a good target with it's higher gravity and high surface stability, but strong Jupiter tides.
Just an idea.
I can answer any question you may ever have... Though not always correctly.
Excuse me.. we've had this in Nova Scotia for a LONG time. The tides in the Bay of Fundy and the Minas Basin have been driving turbines for 25 years or more.
Obvious problem: silt deposits. The generators more or less dam the inlets and cause tons of silt that normally would not settle, to clog the bays.
Maybe one under the Golden Gate someday??
Wouldn't happen. The Gate is a Regulated Navigation Area with extremely tight traffic lanes. If you obstructed one (even during servicing of anything underwater) you'd bring some bad mojo down on you. VTS get's grumpy when they have to reroute traffic.
There are very few real things in this world...this isn't one of them.
All we need to do in the us is to put our prison population on treadmills hooked to generators. keep them busy and have electricty too
The Archimedes Wave Swing is a really cool idea being developed. It uses no turbines at all. It taps energy from a float under the waves using a linear electrical generator.
Go check it out at: http://www.waveswing.com
Such a tide-power plant has been in operation since 1966 in France. (More links here, too).
Hasn't anyone thought of where this energy is coming from!?! We'd be slowing down the rotation of the Earth! Not to mention flinging the Moon into deep space! To think that people laughed when I got my "Conserve Terrestrial Angular Momentum" T-shirts.
Ok, turbines produce AC, right? +/-/+/- all day - so why do they need to turn the turbines around? Why can't they just make it one big Archemedes Screw?
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
This is for those of you that are so quick to blast Slashdot for posting old news because France already has one. Looks like it's a new technique from the artist's rendition in this article here.
Small distributed powers plants sound good, but they have their own shortcomings. Take this tidal power plant. The website suggested that it will power 1000 homes with a capital investment of over 13.5M USD. That's about $13,500 per household before the powerplant has generated any power. After that maintenence becomes an issue. If you think maintence costs on traditional power plants is high, imagine doing it at the bottom of the ocean.
Our demand for power fluctuates throughout the day (Thus, peak and off peak rates). Most conventional plants can easily adjust the power output to meet the demand at any given time.
Most, not all, but most green power sources do not have this inherent control. Solar power only generates when the sun is shining. Windmills only turn when the wind is blowing. And tidal generators only work when the tide is flowing. Given 2 high and 2 low tides per day, there are four points of no power output each day. Since we can not control when the tides occur (without controlling the moon's orbit) we cannot control when we get max power from a tidal generator.
This presents the problem of what to do during a peak demand period and the tide is either high or low. At present the best alternative is to have another power plant kick in to generate the missing power. That means despite having a green power plant we still need a conventional one that will meet our peak demand.
I am aware of efforts to create storage devices for electric power of the scale needed for cities ( http://www.aip.org/isns/reports/2001/025.html ). These efforts will probably work and prove to be the real reason green power has a future. At the same time these storage facilities will take strain off the conventional generators at peak times and allow them to run more efficiently.
Tidal power is usually very dispersed. So you need to collect it over a wide area. This can be done, but has been expensive. So much so, that people haven't usually bothered, even though various plans have been around since ?? since WWII? earlier?
If these folks have figured out a way to make it efficient, then kudos. But it seems a bit more probable that they just had a place where getting any other kind of power would be too expensive, and tidal turned out to be cheaper. Still, materials and techniques keep changing. At some point this may be the way to go. (And in some places, it already is.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Can i stick one of this in my bath tub?
http://www.energy.ca.gov/etsr/9704ETSR.PDF
a nce/reactors/diablo.html
Where'd you get those numbers from?
From the DoE website on energy generation, wind generation costs are about $.05, but only assuming constant 13mph winds. [1] Thats excluding the costs to build an energy storage plant to store energy for nights.[4] Its also excluding TCO, for example noise pollution, ugliness, bird-chopping, road building to put them up (and cutting down inconvenient nearby forests.) Its also excluding all the pollution from mining, refining, smelting, and manufacturing the equipment.
Wind is also small-scale. For example, all 13,000 bird-choppers in California combined generate half as much power as one of the two nuclear reactors in the Diablo Canyon Nuclear plant. [2][3] (and at that, they generate unreliable power.) For comparison, each nuclear reactor generates 1gw, or about 3000x as much power as the tidal station we're talking about.
Almost all renewable power suffers from this, its usually either intermittent, or of such low density that it cannot source any more than a trivial fraction of the 300MW we use.
Last I heard, the cost for coal or nuclear is $.03/kWh, including disposal costs[7]. Unfortunately, nuclear power is much more expensive due to kooks.[5]
As for global warming, check out [9] or [8], where nuclear energy contributes either the same or much less CO2 than wind or solar energy.
Now, where are your numbers coming from?
Convergence
[1] http://www.nrel.gov/wind/cost.html
[2] http://www.energy.ca.gov/wind/overview.html
[3] http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/at_a_gl
[4] http://www.awea.org/pubs/factsheets/Cost2001.PDF
Which certainly seems to follow your claim.. However, if you look at where the actual numbers come from, you see something different and unpleasant. [6]
[5] http://www.ecn.cz/temelin/diablo.htm
Where the discussion about Diablo Canyon was an environmental 'success', because they forced construction to take 10 years and cost TWELVE times as much to build.
At least decomissioning costs aren't ballooning from kooks.[8]
[6] http://www.energy.ca.gov/etsr/reportsu.html
Which isn't quite so rosy. Specifically, they don't deal at all with the costs of the energy storage infrastructure. Intermittent power is EXPENSIVE if it
has to be stored. The *baseline* storage cost is on the order of
$.15/kw*H
[7] http://www.uic.com.au/nip08.htm
[8] Vattenfall 1999, Vattenfall's life cycle studies of electricity, also energy data 2000.
It shows the following CO2 emissions in kg/MWh (approx): Hydro 3, wind 5.5, nuclear 6, solar PV 50, gas combined cycle 450, coal 980, gas turbines (as reserve, peak load) 1170.
[9] Kivisto A. 1995, Energy payback period & CO2 emissions in different power generation methods in Finland
Finland (all kg/MWh CO2): wind 14, nuclear (centrifuge) 10, nuclear (diffusion) 26, Solar PV 95, gas 472, and coal 894
Who needs fusion? Fission works now. Fission is cheap. Fission can supply energy for millions or billions of years.
Please compare what is comparable. When using fossil energies, you are consuming a capital. When using renewable energies, you are using that capital to generate revenue. Saying that the first is not "cost effective" compared to the second is just like saying that starting a business with the loan from a bank is less "cost effective" than stealing the money from that bank !
What we want is solutions that are power effective, that is which give more usable energy that they consume, OK. But no such thing as cost effectiveness can be defined in the long run, among other things because costs are completely unknown in the long run.
"In the long run", of course, all of us will be dead. However mankind does not have to, and certainly does not have to because we robbed them of vital chemical components (petroleum is used to make all kinds of plastics) just because we like to fun around in cars and jets.
Not to mention unwanted climatic effects,that are not paid by those who generate it, and therefore are nowhere accounted for (the so-called "externalities"). Remember that just one round-trip jet to China exhausts your energy quota for the year according to what was proposed at the Rio conference.
Now, unfortunately, we do not have any foreseeable solar-powered jumbo jet in the future, nor does it seem in the realm of possible. Well, having a Rolls or a Ferrari does not seem to be in the realm of my possible either. So what ? I just "do without them", as they say in France, and it is not that much of a problem
I have good news for you : a study made by EDF (a little more than 20 years ago, but I do not think power distribution technologies have changed that much since; after all, we still use the same copper, transformers and high-tension lines), the price of electricity amounts roughly
- 1/3 to production costs
- 1/3 to distribution costs
- 1/3 to commercial costs
In other words, if you do not have to face distribution costs, you can afford to be 33% less efficient without wasting the community resources.
By the way, this can remind us that making solar power plants is really a shadok idea, because the main interest of solar energy is that is arrives pre-distributed in the first place. Bertrand Russell said once that ou species was "intelligent, but not reasonable"
Just another idea : we are presently stuck in a kind of gravity well (Arthur Clarke once said that getting into low orwit was already half-way, energetically speaking, of any point in the universe).
Once we learn to live in outer space, I cannot see any reason why we would want to get back living deep in gravity well again (we need gravity to live well, but centrifugal effects can simulate it quite well at no energy cost).
To make a comparison, if we were born in a basement and ever had a chance to get out in free air, I doubt that we would think about getting back to that basement again.
Except, of course, if experience shows that it is the only way to be reasonably protected from radiations and small meteorites.
The moon is not exactly the "source" of tides : the earth rotates (24 hours), and as the moon rotates more slowly (28 days) and part of the sea is following it, the two movement differ.
If one takes away energy from tidal waves, the angular momentum of earth-moon will not change - since no external force occurs - and as the earth will slow down from the very same amount of energy that you get, the moon will drift away fom the earth, not come closer.
Here is an interesting short article, with drawing, in a community newspaper about a planned tidal generating system in NYC. Prototype has evidently been funded. One secret to successful tidal power projects is evidently finding just the right place. http://www.nyc10044.com/wire/2223/rivrpowr.html
Why in the world would you build a solar power sat from materials that are conventionally launched from Earth at $10,000 / kg?
Build them from lunar materials instead. The much shallower gravity well would bring your costs down to, at most, $100 / kg.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Bad science, bad politics.
Why in the world would you build a solar power sat from materials that are conventionally launched from Earth at $10,000 / kg?
Build them from lunar materials instead. The much shallower gravity well would bring your costs down to, at most, $100 / kg.
Plus the $1000,000/kg amortized cost of the lunar mining facility.
Mining of lunar material is only cost-effective if you expect to use millions of tonnes of it or more. Solar power satellites don't _need_ that much mass, especially now that thin-film photovoltaic cells are becoming practical.
It's is a contraction for it is or it has.
Its is a possessive pronoun meaning, more or less, of it or belonging to it.
+1 Creative Goatse Link