Green Energy From Manhattan's East River

circletimessquare writes "New York City's waterways are geographically unique in that they force tides from Long Island Sound down the East River in one of the most concentrated, powerful flows on the East Coast. If all goes as planned, a company called Verdant Power will build a $20 million, 10 megawatt underwater turbine field there by late 2005. The turbines spin slowly enough so that they pose no threat to wildlife (har har), are placed in spots where they do not interfere with commercial shipping, and are deep enough to not interfere with recreational boating. About the only drawback to the scheme are the supply shortage periods when the tides are slack. The New York Times has the scoop."

Comments

Re:Good News

[Anonymous Coward]

Tide power has been used for awhile but this project will add to the knowledge base.

Re:Green Indeed

[HBI]

By the time you get done with environmental impact statements regarding the vibrant marine life in the East River, the cost goes up significantly.

Great Idea, but..

[phamNewan]

It also highlights the difficulty that all green based solutions have, nature. Solar power has cloud problems, windmills will lack wind, and hydro-electric dams face droughts.

None of the green energy sources can provide the reliable energy that modern society demands. While this one will at least be very predictable, it will only be able to generate power when the tides are right, and that has no relation to peak power usage times. Sometimes the timing will be right, but the rest is wasted.

This will probably get me mod'd Troll, but nuclear power is the best available option, and since we cut research into making it better, we are now behind France (the horror) in nuclear technology.

Despite all the concerns, nuclear is the best choice we have until we can finally find a more efficient way to generate electricity without using steam.

Re:Great Idea, but..

[medelliadegray]

you are correct that solar may have cloudy days and turbines can face calm days.

but just think for a moment--solar still generates SOME power on cloudy days. turbines can produce some energy as well on the days that arent ideal. i dont know at what point turbines become useless, but it has to be a pretty calm day.

The point is it mitigate your resources in many locations. if every roof had had solar panels over their shingles, and every telephone/power pole had a mini turbine ontop of it, then i ask you--how often is it pitch black and dead calm out EVERYWHERE--night time?--even then the clam is usually localised.

clouds move, and so do wind patterns. energy can be shipped from the sunny spots to the cloudy, and so on and so forth.

Excess energy from all of those turbines and roofs---well if we ever get to a hydrogen economy--there wont be such a thing--it will go toward electrolosis for hydrogen production.

speratic nuclear plants can pickup the energy needs of nighttime hours and such--hell if it was a true hydrogen economy, people would just use some hyrdogen to make their electricity, also, maybe we'd see an end to the excessive use of streetlights littering towns and cities. Their great untill about 10:00 pm, but cmon, after that its an annoyance.

nuclear has and will continue to have its place, but in my opinion it should be used as a backup for when the more "green" methods cant put out enough juice.

Re:from the pcb-heaven dept????

[Flingles]

Being slashdot you might have to elaborate on what a pcb is. I was assuming that the Hudson got dumped with printed circuit boards. I presume in America there was a bunch of journalists predicting the end of the world because the Hudson river was dumped with these, and thus everybody knows what the other pcb is.

Re:10MW

[Nutria]

10MW won't make a dent I think, but it's a good idea as an experiment.

Sure, it'll make a dent. Small dent, yes, but so what?

Even a Dubya fanboy like me knows that we need to diversify, instead of bleat and whine.

Re:10MW

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

But the nuclear plants are... NUCLEAR! OH NO!

Tim

Re:10MW

[Anonymous Coward]

the article said that 10MW will save 650,000 barrels of oil per year. At $40 per barrel of oil that come out to be $26 millions.

That's a lot of pizza

Re:Green Indeed

[sp0rk173]

Not only is it heavily subsidised, the rates don't take into account the entire cost of mining and processing the radioactive material. "Cheap" nuclear power is a myth, perpetuated by the pseudo-capitalism we have in this country.

Re:Green Indeed

[Ignignot]

"Cheap" nuclear power is a myth, perpetuated by the pseudo-capitalism we have in this country.

And the idea of green energy is impossible - wind and solar take up too much space to be viable. Ireland is converting as much area as possible into wind power and they are going to generate 10%. To have enough solar power to replace all energy needs we would need to cover someplace the size of Colorado with panels, and replace an area the size of New Jersey every year. All hydroelectric is already in use. Nuclear power's big benefit is that there is a huge supply of fuel, and its waste, while hazardous, doesn't go out into the air and into our lungs. Coal puts radioactive material into the air, and oil leads to things like the current fiasco in the mid east. What solution do you propose to this impossible problem?

Re:Put it next to a rich liberal's house

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like the pious liberal hypocrites of Nantucket Sound, where wind energy could supply immense amounts of clean energy-- but ohhh, NOoo, the windmills get in the way of the view from the deck of my yacht, put them where some poor white trash live, thank you; serves them right for voting for Bush.

I personally doubt these Nantucket liberals voted for Bush. And I don't quite understand what particular Bush policy allowed or prevented the windmills from being constructed.

But you are right. Most green liberal elites are hypocrites; they like to tell me how to live...as long as they don't have to play by the same rules

the difference is like this:

[circletimessquare]

conservatives don't tell you what to do with your money, but they tell you how you should live your life (social conservatives)

liberals tell you what to do with your money (fiscal liberals), but they don't tell you how you should live your life

so liberals lose monetarily, and conservatives lose socially

and therefore, liberals are friends of the poor, whie conservatives are friends of the rich

it's a choice you make, which hypocrisy bothers you less, and frankly, i like people who tell me what to do with my wallet a lot more than i like people who tell me how to behave in the bedroom

Cost of saving electricity compared to making it.

[sbaker]

In order to extract energy from the water, it's gotta slow it down somewhat. When you do that, you cause sediment to settle out prematurely where it never settled out before. That can change the direction of flow, causing erosion in new places and deposition in others - maybe cause loss of habitat for some animals and plants.

There isn't *ANY* power generation system that doesn't have some kind of impact. The issue is whether this has a more acceptable impact than the other ways to get that much power.

The problem I have with these projects is that if you spent the same amount of money on energy saving plans, you'd end up with the same results - but with LESS environmental impact - not more.

For example, I live in Texas where a large fraction of everyone's electricity bill is paying for airconditioning and heating. By spending about an extra 5% on the price of my house, I ended up with about three times better thermal insulation factor compared to a typical Texas home. As a result (since A/C and Heat are such large fraction of electric bills here), it's no suprise that my electric bills are about half what my friends and neighbours are getting for similar sized houses. (My house is built with this stuff: http://oikos.com/companies/grnblock.html)

Crunching the numbers, my additional 5% up-front cost is repayed in about 5 years...and the house should last at least 25 years so this is a really good deal.

However, getting people to pay that 5% up-front cost is HARD. (Why else would so few houses be built that way?)

But what if the government or the electricity generation companies paid you to add that extra insulation and took the cost of it back from your fuel bill savings in the form of a tax of some kind? An initial outlay of $20M would halve the electicity consumption of about 5,000 houses like mine. That's about the same as building a 3.5MW powerstation. Not as good as the 10MW one that they are planning to build in NY for $20M - but mine lasts for 25 years without maintenance, labor, etc - has not technical risk and has a really GOOD effect on the environment by reducing the net amount of electricity that has to be generated.

That's just one example - I'm sure there are others.

TANSTAAFL

[ZorbaTHut]

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

Also known as conservation of energy.

The wind-turbine people said "oh, it couldn't possibly make any difference." Now - surprise - there's some evidence wind power screws with wind patterns.

The tidal-power people are saying "it couldn't possibly make any difference" and give figures like "the entire planet's energy needs could be filled twice over by the ocean's tides". Except that actually getting that much energy out of the ocean would involve, oh, stopping the tides, and I don't think anyone's claimed that won't cause serious problems.

So this generator produces 10MW, does it? Where's the power coming from? Answer: it's slowing down the river. Will this cause future problems? I have absolutely no idea, but it's something that would be nice to find out.

Whenever someone comes up with a source of untapped power, think for a second and figure out where the energy is actually coming from.