Green Energy Now, And On The Tide

thpr writes "The Electric Power Research Institute and its partners have completed their Offshore Wave Power Feasibility Demonstration Project, which defined potential wave energy projects off the shores of the United States. This is building off of work already done in Scotland (and elsewhere). San Francisco, New York and other areas are considering trial installations of the technology. It is interesting to note (table 1 in the report) that the energy density (kW/m^2) that can be achieved is much higher than wind or solar. In addition, harnessing 24% of available wave energy near the US at 50% efficiency is equal to all of the hydropower currently generated in the US (~7% of total electricity production). On a separate note, in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy's $1.2B 2006 budget the Department of Energy is closing out the Hydropower Technologies Program. Maybe that's why this technology is missing from our National Energy Policy?" Until it reaches maturity, though, U.S. readers can pay for other forms of green energy.

Comments

Low impact system?

[irhtfp]

When you take energy out of a system, you affect that system and all other systems that depend on it.

In other words, these projects affect the currents, at least locally which in turn *will* affect the biological systems that depend on these currents, to what extent? I don't think we know.

We need alternate energy, but we need to honestly compare the impact of each energy extraction method we consider. Personally, I think nuclear is the lowest impact energy tech.

Re:Other green energy sources

[dolphinling]

Well, considering that burning coal puts out more radioactivity than nuclear energy (not to mention all the soot, CO2, CO, etc), I'd say that nuclear is pretty green. It could be made even more green if we didn't ban reprocessing. A recent discover (or was it wired?) had a nice article on it, pick it up, it can tell you a lot more than me.

Re:A look at solar.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not going to bother to check your math, I'll just quote from a January 2005 report of the Solar Energy Industries Association:

"Solar collectors on a 100-by-100-mile area in the Southwest could generate as much electricity as the United States consumes in a year. Alternatively, solar systems on roofs, parking lots, and other developed land across the nation could generate all the electricity we need--now, in 2030, and 2050--without building on the nation's open spaces."

I've seen similar figures from Sandia labs.

I'm really puzzled why people always try to figure out how much space would be taken up by a centralized solar power plant. The appealing thing about solar power (and fuel cells, and wind power) is that it's distributed--generating units are scattered wherever power is necessary. If you think about it that way, the space taken up by solar panels (or whatever) is negligible.

Go into an urban or suburban area and see how much space is taken up by buildings with flat roofs, parking lots, etc. Imagine that space covered by solar panels. Now realize that you can clad tall office buildings in solar panels that look like glass (and that let light through to the interior). There's an idea--make the buildings generate some of the power that they consume.

Read the Fucking Document!

[EatingPie]

Aight, I've seen tons of misinformation and bogus speculation here, and I just perused the document!!

(1) The facility is out to sea. Hawaii is the closest at 2.5KM, while California is at 13 to 20 Km.

(2) They are in about 40M of water. Waves break in about 1-4M of water, depending on size.

(3) The things FLOAT on TOP of the water! (The "Pelamis" design does anyway.) They are mored with cable, and are no where near breakers.

(4) They are not so much "wave" energy as "swell" energy (ie waves = coastal, swell = deep ocean).

Huge variation in wave height makes near-shore uneconomical when waves are small (often), and SEVERELY dangerous when large. (Name a man made structure that has withstood BREAKING waves or a sustained period of time.)

Even when waves are small on the coast, deep sea swells still oscillate across the surface unhindered. The point is to harness these oscillations for energy (as far as I can tell).

The environmental impact will be truly negligable, except for moorings and swell energy depleted before it reaches the coastline.

The very environmentally-paranoid surfer in me says... Go for it!

-Pie

Re:Other green energy sources

[wjwlsn]

The UK, USSR, French, Isreali, South African, Pakistani, Indian, North Korean, Iranian and Indonesian experience is that it is a very complicated and expensive technology which is only worth doing if you are developing weapons.

You're right, I'm incredibly frightened of what could happen as a result of the burgeoning nuclear weapons arsenals in Finland and Sweden.

The Canadians appear to be making money selling their technology to others, so they can break even - addicts can make money when they turn pusher.

Wow, what a fair and balanced analogy.

The Japanese had the navies of the USSR and the Chinese to worry about, and an energy supply that only came by sea, so expensive nuclear was an option for strategic reasons.

Expensive compared to what available alternatives? Japan's large and abundant reserves of coal and natural gas? Their mighty rivers? Broad expanses of unpopulated land for wind and solar?

It is still an unproven technology - even pebble bed is still at the prototype stage and it's forerunners are expensive white elephants running on 1950's technology.

Unproven compared to what? LWR technology may not be the latest hot, new concept in power generation, but it has a lot of advantages... not the least of which is that it is fairly well proven. Improvements are possible, yes... but look at the improvements over the past twenty years. US plants are now running 90% of the time, unplanned shutdowns are at a very low level, planned outages now take two weeks instead of two months, personnel exposures and radwaste are at all-time lows... what else do you want, free milk and cookies?

Nuclear power is an incredibly complex way to boil water...

Complex, but manageable. It also has the benefit of extremely low fuel, operation, and maintenance costs. Oh, and it's reliable baseload.

containment requires exotic materials which do not come cheap...

Yeah, concrete and steel are pretty exotic, and so expensive.

The theory has always been that the incredible capital cost is offset by the low running costs with nuclear power - but this has not yet been the case.

That depends on where and when the plant was built, and in comparison to the available alternatives at the time. If your benchmark is coal, then nuclear usually doesn't look so great economically. If your benchmark is wind or solar, then nuclear looks much better. Oh yeah, go talk to Finland about how terribly expensive nuclear is compared to the alternatives... maybe they'll decide not to build a new 1600 MWe reactor.

Fraud has certainly occurred on a large scale in the US electricity market - now is it that or some strange superiority over the British that has provided the huge disparity in apparent costs between the USA and the UK with respect to nuclear power.

Actually, there is a big difference betweeen US and UK nuclear. In the UK, you have old Magnox plants operating at very high cost relative to average LWR technology used in the US and elsewhere. Magnox was basically the first generation of nuclear power technology, and a lot of its design was dictated by the desire to extract plutonium for weapons production. Then you have AGR, which appears to be very good technologically, but was eventually dropped in favour of LWR technology. So, in the end, the UK has just one fairly modern LWR at Sizewell B, and a bunch of old, expensive plants based on technology that nobody else is using.

Another question to consider, is why Jimmy Carter, the nuclear engineer president, stopped building nuclear power plants?

Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer, and he was President, but to say he stopped all building of nuclear power plants in the US is simply false. Old plant orders were