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

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.

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.