Slashdot Mirror
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."
Maybe one day they'll be able to get clean water from it too.
I've seen a lot of green stuff in that river, but I didn't think it was energy.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
It's more of a brownish-octarine-indescribable colour. Wonder if smell could generate energy..
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
True green energy comes from Kryptonite.
I wonder what they're planning on building these out of. I live a few hundred yards away from the east river in brooklyn and everything in the water for more than a day has the odd tendency to melt... or mutate.
^nA! Creatures in my Head
Yeah, isn't Doc Ock's ball'o'fusion at the bottom of the river now?
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
Giant spinning fan blades don't really care how fast they're spinning when they hit soft squishy meat.
10MW won't make a dent I think, but it's a good idea as an experiment. It would be barely 1% of the capacity of one of the nuclear plants up the road.
"The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces." --Aldo Leopold (Paraphrased)
That's the moderators for you. Collectively ignorant, singularly out to get you.
Presently here, but not there.
There was an Ask Slashdot some months ago discussing ways to get off the grid using something like this. Whilst what the NYT article describes is certainly not for your average DIYer, some very interesting points were made in that Ask Slashdot about this form of enery generation.
The revolution will not be televised.
The only problem is that because the source is tidal, the availability of the power cycles around the clock once per orbit of the moon. Depending on the tides, the power may or may not be available during periods of peak demand, so you still need either an alternative source of power or a means of storing the power until it's needed.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm making a radio broadcasting book, and I had a question about the New York water system that I never quite addressed.
It's on this picture: http://www.usinternet.com/users/kyledrake/newyork- radio.jpg
It's an old field strength determination from the 1920s. See the water area below the taller buildings with the '20' strength? Is that water salty, fresh, or a mix of both (salty-leaning, or fresh-leaning even)? The reason I ask, is because if it is salty, it shows with more signifigance the blocking ability of structures (as salt water is very conductive).
Thank you!
Sometimes you start small and expand once you've proven a concept as sound.
I recently read a book about the 1968 power outage in NY, and back then they had 6 lines w/ about 500 megawatts each (or thereabouts). I imagine it might be somewhat more now, but that gives you an idea.
Just a guess, but given a household uses somewhere between 4 and 9 kilowatts (maybe a 3 kilowatt cooker plus several 100 watt bulbs, plus TV, microwave, washing machine, drying machine), and there are 4 million inhabitants, that would give you around 16 thousand megawatts. Not forgetting business which would probably double that.
According to Business Council of New York, they have 35,847 megawatts, but need another 9,000 megawatts. So make that 45,000 kilowatts in total.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
There is only one other project like this that I have heard of. It's in France, and its the Usine de la Rance.
The Usine Maremotice de la Rance is based on the French equivalent of the St Lawrence Bay. This is a place where the tide amplitude is one of the highest in the world.
At low tide, the sea truly is miles away from the shore. I have been there, and it's amazing how far away the ocean can go... and how fast it can come back. Saint Malo, the nearest city, was actually (a few centuries ago) an island at high tide, and people had to wait for the low tides to cross over the sand to the city.
The 'Usine' itself has been pretty successful, and provides 'clean', tide-based electricity to Saint Malo and other cities, but its ecological impact has been underestimated: the Rance, which used to be a clean river is now severely clogged with mud and silt that are not evacuated by the tide, to the detriment of wildlife. Many bird and fish species have left the river for others or have died off completely.
I hope the company that will build the New York project has taken this data into account for its project (which seems to be the case).
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
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.
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.
Karma: -2^0.5 . Mainly due to the imbibing of dihydrogen monoxide
in fact, the salinity goes up to poughkeepsie (the river to your left, the hudson) a 2 hour drive away... during low rain periods, such as the summer, the salinity creeps up even higher than that, but poughkeepsie is generally considered the point where brackish water gives way to fresh water
on the right is the east river, which leads to long island sound (all ocean) and behind you, from the picture's perspective, is the atlantic ocean (all ocean)
that spot you are talking about is between the tip of manhattan and governor's island, al ocean water, all the time
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Isn't really very much... The company I work for allready sell windtubines at 3MW. Other companies
sell even bigger ones (4.5MW I believe.)
These turbines takes a lot of manpower to keep running. Stuff needs to be repaired every month or so. I can't start to imagine the problems one would have when trying to put them down into the salty waters of East River!
But then again: One have to try and get the technology running. That was how the windturbine-buisness got started, too, and that is big buisness these days.
"Though I don't think 10MW will make a huge difference as far as power needs, this certainly does show a good step twords so-called "green power"."
People expect a "silver bullet" solution. One energy source that'll solve all their problems. However a wise energy policy is a distributed, varied enery policy. From green generation, to efficient homes, and businesses.
Hydro is so abundant here that we only have to import 10% of our power needs! =)
That's right, we're power importers in BC. We're just lucky that BC Hydro can literally turn on and off the generators with next to no cost. This lets them, and eventually us, benefit from high priced exports when there's peak power demand elsewhere, balanced against larger amounts of relatively cheap imported power at off-peak times.
I guess my point would be, don't be too proud of power being mostly "clean" hydro - it may not stay that way forever.
At least the power coming from it will be environmentally friendly, even if the water isn't.
NTITE
-You can cry, but you'll still die. There'll be no tears in the end.
I thought PCB's were a big pollution issue in most of the developed world? Anyway, it's a class of chemicals. Here's the wiki link: Polychlorinated biphenyl. They build up in the food chain - I think. Anyway, the Wiki article knows more than I do.
And now from the SANE point of view ...
... like the East River if you just happen to be in that part of the world.
just so you know, PCB's often build up on road surfaces, having been expelled in small quantities from vehicle exhaust.
That gets washed into the surrounding drainages
In Victoria BC, environmentalists are trying to sue the city for allowing PCB's to enter the surrounding ocean. Victoria doesn't dump PCB's. The source was found to be the runoff from roads.
Victoria isn't even a big city.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
that's not once but TWICE per orbit of the moon, which is ever 25 hours, so the cycle is every 12.5 hours...
but wait there's more: as mentioned in the article, the turbines swivel on their base and face the incoming tides, then swivel on their base and face the outgoing tides... so really, that's FOUR TIMES per every 25 hour tidal cycle, so that's 6 hours 15 minutes between high and low tide, the vast middle period of which the turbines are cranking away
as mentioned in the article, there's only roughly 6 hours every day when the turbines aren't moving... and those 6 hours are cut up into 4 equal pieces, equally spaced apart, in a 25 hour cycle, which means that every day, the slack periods shift an hour
so the devil's in the details, but it certainly means that this power source isn't as transitory as you initially described it, although it is still most definitely cyclical, just on a much tighter schedule than it originally appears to be
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There is also a tidal-power plant in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. Like these ones, it was built as a test of the technology. Only it's already been around for 20 years.
It puts out 20 MW, and is on the Bay of Fundy, where you will find the truly highest tides in the world.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
...somebody is very pissed off at having to pay shipping costs for a 10-ton hydroelectric turbine he never ordered.
It can act as a means of disposal for the mob.
sorry, st malo doesn't have them, two or three places in the world can argue this one, there a place in canada I think, fundy / funday bay or something, bristol channel, etc... they all get about 16 metres at peak....
e rn.jpg / se vernbore.jpg
very close to st malo is the ras de sein, which can lay claim to having some of the fastest tidal currents on earth, eg 9+ knots (real fun in a 30 foot sailing boat with a max hull speed of 7 knots, even more fun when wind and tide oppose each other... lol
the bristol tides run up the severn, which narrows gradually over many miles, leading to something known as the "bore"... surfers have ridden this wave for several miles...
links to pix of the bore
http://www.xmission.com/~dlweber/images/sev
http://www.phy.bris.ac.uk/research/theory/Berry
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
www.sjbaker.org
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.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
At low tide, the sea truly is miles away from the shore.
And how, pray tell, is this feat accomplished?
Actually this reminds me of one of the stupid practical jokes the more experienced hands would pull on the 'boots' (newcomers, green-behind-the-ears, etc) when I was in the Coast Guard. They were so used to finding various lines (ropes) for different things-- anchor lines, mooring lines, whatever, that when told to go find a shore line, they'd start looking for rope. The laughter would always come after they'd come to you asking where to find it. Just like that left-handed monkey wrench, or the smoke shifter.
Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
I think that the real question is: Won't all the dead bodies jam the turbines?
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Yes this is all great but will it grind up all those dead bodies floating in the east river so we don't have to look at them?