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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!
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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"
Groundwave is a very important factor at lower frequencies, because low frequencies 'travel' along the ground (a natural property of their longer wavelength). The more conductive the ground is, the farther the signals will travel (based on the output wattage of course).
For very high frequencies, like Wi-Fi, the groundwave is considerably less important. With Wi-Fi, the line-of-sight is the most important factor. So you're right if you're thinking about higher frequencies, which are where most of the modern radio systems are operating. My book is about mediumwave (AM band) broadcasting however, so concepts like groundwave still play a pretty important part.
I would be alarmed by that article if most of it were even misleading instead of simply false.
The Price-Andersen Act simply allows the government to act as an insurance broker for nuclear power plants. The plants PAY for the insurance, and it only covers small accidents-- maximum liability for the government is something like $10 million. Furthermore, the act allows for priave companies to step in to take over the insurace after a period of some years-- something that private companies have indeed done. (The PA Act has actually made taxpayers money, as plants have paid out more than they have received, just like any successful insurance company. So it doesn't count as subsidy at all.)
As for the "$66 billion" figure, that's even worse. They mean, "The military has spent $66 billion researching nuclear reactors for their own use between 1948 and 1998."
Nuclear power does receive some subsidies, but not many-- especially compared to wind and solar, which are absolutely not cost effective. Coal, the second cheapest method of generating electricity (next to nuclear, unremarkably), receives over a billion dollars a year from the federal government just to support miners who have developed black lung disease. Oil receives billions as well. In fact, anything you can name receives more money than nuclear.
Nuclear power is not popular, and politicians know it. If nuclear power really received these nefarious subsidies, every senator in Congress would be biting at it so s/he could claim to be "fighting for safer power." Do you really think any member of Congress could pass up the chance to guarantee re-election?
(PS-- solar has some nasty hazardous waste products. The panels themselves are about as toxic as cyanide, as measured by LD50, and generous amounts of arsenic are produced as a result of the doping process of the silicon panels. Furthermore, when solar panels electromigrate, that's it-- if you try to recycle them, you end up using more energy than you got out of the panel in the first place. Those shiny toxic squares have to be thrown away.)
IANANT,BIASTGMOLAARR (Not a nuclear technician, but I am studying to get my operator's license at a research reactor.)
Whatever it is I'm complaining about, I'm sure the Republicans did it. This is