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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??"
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.
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.
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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.
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