Slashdot Mirror
Water Now More Awesome Than Previously Thought
Dan writes "Wired has a great article about a guy who thinks we can provide unlimited energy , accelerate crop growth, desalinize and purify drinking water, obtain health benefits and provide air conditioning, all by pumping up water from the depths of the ocean."
frist psot!
This is a fantastic idea, except for one flaw. This would only work for cities near the coast. Where I'm from (Minnesota) I don't see how this could possibly work (Lake Superior is very cold though, that is a possibility).
I like how he irrigates the farms. The sweating of the pipes below ground is a great idea. It seems much more efficient than spraying water everywhere, and having a lot of it evaporate.
He may be a nut (or not, I'm not a good judge of character), but he does have a great way of looking at his environment.
There were scientists working on this in the 70's, and they had limited results.
also fp
This will run out some day if we exploit it like we do oil and other things.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Pretty Awesome huh?
WhatMeWorry
"You see, I apply cold temperatures to different parts of my body in three bastings. The third is the most complicated - I ice the terminuses of my lymphatic system. My body heals itself. Look at these hands," he says, opening and closing his fists. "I have no joint pain of any kind!"
You're just numbing the pain. Idiot.
That /. would post a story on the awesomeness of water shortly after ThinkGeek begins selling a Water Powered Clock and a Mini Water Dispenser
Stupid planted articles...I'll buy what I want!...oooh...clock...
How Jaded Are You?
What the world needs, facing this energy crisis, is more pseudo-scientific, completely unfeasible, sketchy "unlimited energy" solutions.
Luckily it's pure grade-A horse poop. Imagine the climactic effects, and effects on the oceans ecosystems, if we had the equipment to pump that much water up from the floor? IIRC, it takes 100s to 1000s of years for nature to do the same thing..
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Best. Headline. Ever.
Dam, those pages in that story are really ugly.
Be careful! Dihydrogen Monoxide can be a dangerous thing! Spread the word.
Doesn't pumping up water from the ocean consume lots of energy?
Wouldnt excessive use of this method perhaps alter ocean temperatures?
Maybe it will turn out like windmills- they take negligible energy out of the wind.
OTEC, as a concept, has been around for quite some time. Prototypes have been built and tested around the world. Old news!
what effect will it have on the ocean? Will it disrupt the wild life? What does this thing have going against it? That was a poor article for Wired. If this technology is going to be so successful why isn't being tried all over the place? It must have opposition for some reason. Wired didn't cover it in the story however.
Let's wait and see.
Great, now we're going to thermally pollute the deep sea? Perhaps the only ecosystem left untouched by man?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
it's way more awesome than you even know... now where did i put my bong... what? no way! that uses water too! sweeeet!
A bit onionesque if you ask me....which you didn't. What's with the confirmation thing when I post?
OTEC? Holy Christ don't tell me that the Arabs are already planning on price-fixing this market before it even gets started!
I'm sure you get my point.
Be careful who you disclose water's potential to... before you know it you'll have Keanu Reeves trying to outrun blue shock waves on motorcycles...
Yup...
What about "Hawai water" sure errection
or "Hawai water" penis enlargement in just 3 weeks?
http://www.ocees.com/
The efficiency of these system is extremely low because the temperature difference is so miniscule. For thermodynamic efficiency purposes temperatures are measured in Kelvin and temperature differences are only a few percent. The maximum efficiency of these plants in an ideal world is only 6%. When you account for the very large amounts of energy needed to pump huge volumes of water, the real efficiency is only 2-3%. This FAQ covers this and other issues.
Yes, you can get energy, but not much.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Why? Isn't there enough water at the surface of the ocean?
Looks like the vision of Captain Nemo from 20K Leagues Under the Sea. Wave turbines, gold extraction, and environmentally sound food gathering, Jules Verne recognizes that we are barely tapping the vast resources of the deep.
Call me crazy, but I can't help but wonder about the prospect that there will be significant thermal pollution because of this process. It's unclear how the removing of cold water from a depth and presumably returning it to the same depth would affect microbial life. Maybe it isn't piped back down, but is discharged at a lesser depth?
Hopefully, Keanu Reeves decides to recreate his earlier success in fighting evil corporate scientists by releasing the water-to-energy schematics under GPL.
I've been applying icy cold beverages (usually beer) to the INSIDE of my body for years, and let me tell ya what, after a six'er, let me assure you I'm feeling no joint pain at all. I do tend to have a headache the next day though...
As some one allready mentioned this would run out... and when it does, the gulfstream would cease to exist. ...same effects of global warming.
Seriously, cooling parts of yourself with ice causes the body to react and change bloodflow to the cooled area, usually increasing it markedly. The extra circulation does help healing.
Funny thing is, heat kinda does the same thing, albeit not as effectively. Most folks don't like the ice and go for the heat for injuries, though, because heat "feels better". Icing an injury can actually be painful - drop a sprained ankle into a large bucket of ice and water for ten or twenty minutes and the first minute or so will have you twisting and turning and writhing as your foot hurts like hell from the cold water. The pain does go away though after a minute or two.
Heat won't cause that pain. But heat will increase the internal bleeding from an injury if it's not fully healed yet, making the injury worse. Icing an injury will help stop any internal bleeding.
At least that's what my college football trainer told me one time as I was sitting waist-deep in a whirlpool of ice and water to treat a pulled groin muscle. Talk about having your balls shrivel up...
That temperature gap can be harnessed to create a nearly unlimited supply of energy.
Nearly unlimited?
So now we suck up all the cold water and heat up the ocean even more.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
yeah, yay for electricity.
but does it run linux?
http://illhostit.com/ - Webhosting
I wonder?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
provide unlimited energy [...] by pumping up water from the depths of the ocean
;-)
I guess the energy you need to pump up the water would be provided by the same water - not.
I have no [...] pain of any kind!
Pain-free! Guess that explains it...
He's 80, so he can't be lasting very long from here on out. I hope he wrote something down then.
This sig no verb.
Hey! OPEC is a South American thing :-)
>>pseudo-scientific, completely unfeasible, sketchy "unlimited energy" solutions
I'm sure they said the same thing about the internal combustion engine. Thanks for your complete lack of vision.
Just think for a moment what a clean source of power this could be. Stirling engines (external combustion engines) are quire remarkable little machines which extract power from a thermal delta. Hook a deepsea cold water supply to a Sterling engine and you'd have an extremely reliable, zero-pollution source for reciprocal motion or electricity generation. And the hotter the climate, the more effective it would be due to the greater thermal delta. Wouldn't you call a zero-emission engine be a desirable product?
Unlimited energy?
I bet this guy will now die froïÎfreak accident of some sort.
Check out 'Blind Man's Bluff', which is about the post-WWII craziness that was Cold War submarine espionage. This guy is smart, smart, smart.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
In theory cold-water energy works; anytime you have a temperature differential it can be harnessed to create energy according to the laws of thermodynamics. In practice, I'd question whether the constant pumping and maintenance (saltwater is highly corrosive) wouldn't require more energy than you get out of this system.
One more thing: it's all fun and games until you suck a whale into the input pipe! But seriously, if you pump up nutrient-rich soup from the deep, in a few years your pipe is going to be so clogged up with marine critters that your flow rate is going to tend towards zero...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
For all you Engineering Types, here is a page with an animation which shows the basis for the technology:
http://www.ocees.com/mainpages/Powersystems.html/
I remember visting a small lab like this on the big island of hawaii for a 8th grade science trip, not sure if its connected with this but it was really awesome, they were pumping the super cold water into the ground through pipes with plants above them and growing them, the plants never needed water since the pipes acted like a glass full of ice attracting water to it from the air or in this case the ground, which the plants loved this cold and always moist ground to grow in, as i recall the ground wasnt pure dirt either there was alot of volcanic rocks mixed in too.
:D
They also had a i think it was called a cyclon tower in which they used the same process of cold water through the pipes in this tower to attracted the pure water in the air and rain back down into tanks making pure water, it was a really fun trip and it was either hawaii or washington dc for my 8th grade trip sooo
tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
I can't visualise the physics of the electricity generation from the information in the article. Can anyone provide a clearer picture?
Thanks
Water is way more awesome than most people realize - because of hydrogen bonding -
It is a key component in life; it's solvency and structure are what makes biochemistry work.
It has about the widest range of temperature as a liquid of any simple material - making life possible over the face of the earth.
It is the closest thing to a universal sovent we will ever see.
Since it expands on freezing ice floats - just think what a mess the oceans would be if they were made of something that shrank when it froze, and the ice sank. The planet would have much wider extremes in temperature just because of that small fact.
Wate has an immense heat capacity compared to other liquids... moderating our weather
The beat goes on; it's unique chemistry and physics are whe we live off of every day.
... will fully appreciate the suggestion that this idea was probably stolen from the infinite mind of Sir Jean-Paul Taurcard, and we await anxiously for his claim to it.
Try Jose Cuervo.
Just don't burn yourself up.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Pick up an introductory thermodynamics textbook. Find the chapter with the Carnot cycle. Calculate the Carnot efficiency of this setup. Calculate how many thousands of gallons you are going to have to pump to produce a single kilowatt (yes, it's that bad). This was actually a homework problem in my thermo class. You end up with some ridiculous numbers, and wonder how the hell these people are getting money handed to them to build something that's about as useful as a perpetual motion machine.
I have never heard of an "ocean engineer," as opposed to chemical engineer or electrical engineer. Can one really engineer an ocean, or do we need a more politically correct title that accounts for trivialities.... Maybe something like "Cold Water Systems Engineer?" i dunno i'm sleepy. zzzzz
We better work fast. The islands on which they plan to base these deep-ocean temperature mining operations will mostly submerge beneath the rising seas caused by our last wave of "unlimited energy", petrofuels. Their energy needs will be resolved forever, but that won't help the rest of us any.
--
make install -not war
a)underground sweating of pipes is not very effective BECAUSE the sweating is atmospheric condensation, in the ground you will just pull condensation out of the adjacent soil. though it would have some effect, it would not be a complete irrigation solution as soil does not flow like air :)
b)colder water from the depths would produce a LOT of condensation on a hot summer day, but the cost of pumping will reduce the efficiency of the method. consider that pumping will not be extramely expensive, similarly as expensive as pumping the volume of water horizontally because you dont actually lift a volume of water, just displace the water on the bottom to the top and the ocean does the work.
c)very cold water on ocean floor, mildy cool water to warm water on surface = nice temp difference. enough to run a sterling engine on to produce electricity. coupled with solar heat collectors this would infact be practical in some areas.
The idea that you are getting all this freshwater "free of charge" is wrong. All sweating pipes are is rain by another name. If you pull enough water out of the air to supply the water needs of California's farm irrigation, then you have pulled water out that would have rained down upon Arizona (for example).
So now you create even more drought inland in order to supply the needs of the coasts. As a resident of the inlands, <sarcasm> thank you oh so very much!</sarcacm>
www.eFax.com are spammers
This is caused by the body's natural heat regeneration features. You will find that applying the same icy cold beverage will make the headache go away. ;-)
This continuation-technique is also known as "repairing", which is a slight misnormer since it doesn't actually repair, but instead reinstates the body in the wanted state of painlessness
Something that is cold is inherintly less energetic than anything hot. That doesnt mean it wont work, rather it means that even at 100% effeciency it wont be generation as much as a hot system (heat is just a measure of how fast atoms are vibrating). I am desperatley waiting for the fusion revolution in +/- 50 years tho, i drool at the thought of unlimited energy. It will happen, but our narrow-sighted leaders just dont understand the potential of it, and dont invest in it, and then it gets delayed :(
No wonder my girlfriend always tell me to take a cold shower.
Faster growing fruit + unlimited energy + free air-conditioning = multiple orgasms (profit!!!)
...unlimited energy , accelerate crop growth, desalinize and purify drinking water, obtain health benefits and provide air conditioning...
Now that's what I call REAL UTLIMATE POWER!!!!
"And then I visited Wikipedia
Did anyone tell the Russians yet?
I thought that was let's wait and sea
Seriously... the man needs to be heard and not killed by international terrorists. The secret service should protect him immediately.
There are several office buildings in downtown Toronto that are cooled via cold water pumped from lake Ontario. http://www.enwave.com/enwave/view.asp?/dlwc/energy
since nobody has mentioned the carnot engine, can i recomend reading feymans description. his introduction is something like;
1) you have three balls that drop a certain distance and via a leaver this raises one ball three times the distance. then the balls are rearranged, ie, the single raised ball is moved to the original position of the topmost of the three and the bottom of the three is shifted to where the first initial ball is located.
2) ?
3) this is essentially identical to this syphoning system in the article. but the expansion and contraction and heat flow complicates things.
anyway, is the theoretical limit of the efficiency of a heat engine (ie the efficiency of a carnot engine which is an upper bound of all heat engines) (it only assumes a hot and cold reservoir) a function of the difference between the temperatures of the reservoirs.
1)Not unlimited.
Not even virtyally unlimited.
Do the math.
2)Not a new idea, been tried many times, biological fouling of intakes is primary spoiler. Think a inute and you'll realize why.
3)There's a plant running on the big island in hawaii. some energy recovery, primarily benefits cold water aquaculture.
Google is your friend if you're really interested n theis stuff....
Water drawn up from the deep ocean via siphon. I don't recall siphons running up hill working all that well. I have drained my share of aquariums, gravity works in a downward motion last time I checked.
Burying pipes underground for them to cool roots and having the sweatfresh water to supply water for them. Only works in a humid environment and there would be a very limited amount of moisture moving through the ground compared to those carried through air currents.
So you'll pump cold water which is currently already heating up (humboldt squid in Alaska this last year) run it through radiators and the ground in tropical areas then pump it back into the ocean depths. Ya ok that isn't going to screw with the local ecosystem. (Diablo Canyon heated run off caused a sustained algae/seaweed bloom causing an explosion in the sea urchin population)
He's pumping 27K gal/min of 39 deg water to water a minor garden and produce energy for a small research area. What temperature is the water he's dumping back into the ecosystem at 27K gall per minute that produces enough power and water for the equivalent of a small tree hugging family that lives on a tropical beach?
Governments aren't putting more emphasis on alternative energy solutions like this and keep giving money to Oil Company's to further Fossil Fuels.
Our own economy is going to end up ruining this world simply because everyone is too afraid to loose money by backing away from petrolium
put a bottle of club soda in the freezer.
wait until it's super cooled but not frozen
pour it into a glass of ice cbes.
the water will pour and suddenly freeze, right up the stream, into the bottle.
did it today.
AWESOME!
We have very large and deep resovoirs in the western USA. While I doubt that the water is at 5 C, it is probably close. These resoivoirs are refilled each spring with very cold runoff. This sounds like a good use of the temp.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
There are several factors that make up for the inefficiency in power generation:
Places like Saudi Arabia and Chile, which have lots of sun and salt water, but almost no fresh water, should jump on this. Saudi Arabia in particular, which has all the power it needs, could really benefit.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
3rd Grade Scientists Successfully Vaporize Water.
A guy walks into a bar... well, I forgot the joke, but the punchline is that he's an alcoholic.
Why not use the "Peltier-Seebeck effect"? Seems that in this instance it would be much more effient than evaporation.
c t
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peltier-Seebeck_effe
-AC
Power Generation:
Pipes draw warm water from the ocean surface and cold water from the seabed. The warm water enters a vacuum chamber and is evaporated into steam that drives an electricity-producing turbine. The cold water condenses the steam back into water for drinking and irrigation.
Ok, can someone elaborate on this? Sounds like crap on a stick to me.
http://www.ocees.com/mainpages/Powersystems.html
Yes, but will it wash the dishes?
Oh, I guess it will.
See http://www.enwave.com/enwave/dlwc/
Anyone who has been to Dubai (I spent a few years there) knows that desalinization in such large capacities is both financially and technically sustainable... Irigation is a no brainer... Creating surplus energy, though ??? That does not sound plausible...
Now, here you make a good point.
No you have it utterly wrong. imagine you have a certain power need to produce electricity, get water, and grow crops.
now you can create this by burning fossil fuels. This dumps all this power into waste heat and thus changes the worlds tempeature by the equivalent amount.
now imagine you create this power by extracting it from sea water. Well you have first dissipated less heat. second to the extent that this is sustainable (given solar heating) there is no net heat generated whatsoever.
you have homenized the ocean. But if this is sustainable the solar energy should act to restore this. that is to say the net process is this.
1) heat is absorbed from the sun
2) some of this heat goes into reducing the entropy of the ocean by segregating the hot and cold water. the remainder is radiated away in equilibrium. (this has to be true since we are in equilibrium)
3) you can extract work by increasing the entropy of the ocean. mixing it.
4) the solar energy will now act to restore the segregation and less will be reflected.
5) a new equilibrium will be established. but this may not require a large or unsustainable change in ocean temperature.
the question is how much is too much. if the oceans cool just a few degrees on average this could reduce the amount of evaporation and hence the total rainfall on the earth. it would reduce rain transport to the polls shrinking the ice packs. which would change many other things. So the question is how much is too much.
the good news is human power consumption is a fraction of what the total solar flux provides. and since we are now producing less heat frm fossil fuels than before there are other nice benefits. there certainly will be no global warmning!
worse comes to worse one could induce global warming to try to offset the global ocean cooling. Basically our we could create a thermostat.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Yes, yes, this is all good, but will it make my penis longer?
from which one can extract energy, but of course some processes are more efficient than others, and I'm not that familiar with the technologies and how efficient they are, but the name Stirling engine comes to mind as a possibility. This prompted me to actually READ TFA, and incredibly, Stirling engine is not mentioned. Here's a FAQ:c &faq_id=1
http://www.stirlingengine.com/faq/one?scope=publi
am desperatley waiting for the fusion revolution in +/- 50 years tho, i drool at the thought of unlimited energy. It will happen...
And within ten years of "unlimited" energy everyone* will have the electric-power equivalent of SUV's to go to soccer practice and the supermarket. If it's literally freem poower use will expand to meet the the generation (and distribution! We'll need fatter wires) capability.
*For pedants, this word is used idiomatically, not literally. Thank you for your understanding.
Tag lost or not installed.
This cat thinks we should make submarines out of glass? WTF?
MadOgre.com
As reported by the CBC last August, Lake Ontario water cools Toronto offices
Sure, this guy is doing all sorts of neat things at once with the water. For getting it to market and economically proven though, I'd rather see a demo that shows that one of the features is useful than trying to make a whole range of things work.
Even more troubling is that he proposes to pay off investors in seven years- not a great ROI given the risks.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
I just skimmed this ... but there is no violating the 2nd law of thermodynamics. We will begin warming the very deep ocean. Poor deep sea critters.
well aside from the aforementioned points of questionability raised about OTEC, i'd like to point out that even if you do grow crops more than three times quicker than normal, your limiting factor will be soil nutrition, which will mean either quick depletion of nutrients or massive importing of fertilizer. (unless you use all that rich dead stuff from the bottom of the ocean to fertilize, but you'll have to give it a while for bacteria to fix its nitrogen.)
in all seriousness, a cool way to get fresh water and possibly some electricity out of it, if the efficiency problems can be solved. fresh water is scarce enough of a resource as it is.
Yes and by screwing with the oceans themodynamics we will have finally ruined earth as a livable habitat
Ok, take a deep breath, and try to develop a sense of proportion. Oceans are big. Very, very big. We're talking miles deep, and thousands of miles across.
Ocean thermal plants will work with pipes that are very, very small in proportion. Even 100-meter diameter pipes raising cold water from the deep, will have an effect that's just about immeasurable.
Ocean thermal energy poses no more hazard of disrupting ocean currents, than windmills do of stopping the wind.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What impact will the mass use of this technology have on global climate change?
I can see one guy on one farm having little to no impact. But what about when all of China or another nation begins to channel this water? The deep sea currents are responsible for cooling oceans thousands of miles away...
In order to water to codense on the pipes there must be water vapor present. I'll bet you find a lot of watervapor underground where you're cold pipes are.
From TFA:
A polymath who is as comfortable talking about the Law of the Sea as he is the plumbing nightmares inherent when 200 men a day urinate in a submarine,
Okay, gee, what a mental image, I really didn't have to read that. For some reason I don't want to drink anything now...
I know, why don't they 'man' submarines with women, since it seems women don't do that in submarines...
Tag lost or not installed.
How about fluid dynamics? Let's start out simple, okay?
When I was growing up, we had an above ground swimming pool. When it was time to clean it out, I'd stick one end of a garden hose in it, then the other end down the slight decline of a hill. After that, I would then suck on the downhill end of the hose to start a siphon. That hose would continue dumping out water all day until the seal was broken (air entered the hose from inside the pool.)
So let's apply this to a larger scale. Say the top of the pool wall is an island. The bottom of the pool is the ocean floor. Also, let's take the downhill end of the hose and put it back in the pool (the ocean.) Now, in this configuration we're not siphoning downhill, so we have to pump the water to keep it moving--however--the same laws apply and the water travelling down is creating a vacuum which pulls the new water up. Think of how the front of a roller-coaster pulls the end of it over the crest of the hill.
So that's your "perpetiual motion" machine. Something that requires minimal energy to keep going. So how do we keep it going? Well, the laws of thermodynamics still apply and the real catch is in the payload that we're pumping up. On average, there's at least a 15C/30F difference in temperature between the ocean water we're pumping and the air/water at the surface. Any physicist can tell you that this temperature difference can be called "potential energy" and can be harnessed in many ways (In the article, it talks about using a vacuum and turbine, but also a stirling engine could be used.) However you harness this potential energy, a portion of it can be used to continue the pumping.
Saying that the water pumped up from the depths of the ocean is a simple "perpetual motion machine" is simply folly as the energy is not produced from the pumping, but from the temperature difference delivered via the pumping.
"It's a very tangled subsystem." --Windows kernel guru
good explanation
breathing Air is heathy
Let's water all our crops with salt water. Because soil salination is a great thing. Near a lake this is of course feasible, but near an ocean?
its not rocket science
Please tell me you don't design rockets.
yeesh.
"Nokia is not a country, it's the capital of Finland!" -Moderated "Informative". Yeesh.
O.K. - and I suppose it will be a simple matter to filter out all the little creatures that live at the bottom of the sea, and they won't mind this giant hose sucking up their habitat?
Interesting - this looks like it has the influence of Viktor Schauberger, commonly known as the water wizard, behind it. Blueprints for an ocean water pump is in Living Water.
Well, and it's not like you have to start with a dry pipe. Just take surface water to fill the pipe first, then your siphon works from the beginning. Of course the first bit of water will be room-temperature, providing no temp-differential.
"It's a very tangled subsystem." --Windows kernel guru
This article approaches lucidrous use of unlimited. Unlimited freshwater, unlimited power, unlimited food.
Almost like its use was propelled by a perpetual motion machine.
Underground condensation? Anyone know how someone condenses water from the air if the pipes are underground?
How does cold water magically break apart lava flows into arable soil?
This article smells of pseudoscience, right down to the crazy scientist.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
His idea is to use the ocean, but the Western USA has deep resevoirs which are replensihed with spring water. At the base of one of the dams (nearly all of them required dams), a heat exchanger could be added to pick up the low temps (low 40's, high 30s). Here in the west, we can use the extra water, and energy. Cheap way to do so.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
363000000 km^2 x (12000 ft - 3000 ft) x (90 F - 32 F) x (4.186 J/gC)
IANAP (I am not a physicist), but...
Doesn't a siphon only work if you moving water no less than 10m vertically? The atmospheric pressure _pushes_ the water from the lower container to the upper container (via a tube). 1 atmosphere of pressure is only sufficient to push a column of water 10m high.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I first read about OTECs about ten years ago in a book by Marshall Savage called The Millennial Project, a rather wild futurist yarn about colonizing the universe. It is quite an entertaining read, if only a little bit 'out there'. But it is interesting to see a number of his (no doubt collected) ideas slowly come to pass over the past decade. Sadly, their web presence is a little thin and unimpressive...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
who needs unlimited energy from water, since I already run everything off my perpetual motion machine.
Is a hand pumped well, it takes much effort to get the water started initially, but once started, many pumps can actually provide many gallons without continued pumping..
I've seen it happen with one of the Smirnoff "chick" vodka beers. This girl opened one, took a sip, and then held it for a few minutes while watching the tv, the carbonation escaped and the base of the bottle started getting foggy, as it froze from the bottom of the bottle all the way up to the top.
Gravity Sucks
I don't know about everyone else, but in Memphis, we're sitting atop a very deep aquifer. If we could drill another hole close to where we're already pumping water up, we could use the siphoning effect and just recirculate the water thru the aquifer, which is deep enough underground that the water stays around 39 degrees to begin with, just the perpetual siphon effect that could be generated, while dumping the water right back into the aquifer, would work as a way of producing energy, and thus make everything else much easier.
Of course, nobody's had the brains in Memphis to also try just using the massive current of the Mississippi River (steamboat paddle hooked to a generator, anyone?) to produce even cheaper power instead of building some massive hydroelectric dam. Maybe they'll learn?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Small scale extraction may be ok, but using cold water as global energy source is a very bad idea. e.g.:
- It can change the pattern of ocean current, causing major climatic shift.
- It can cause oxygen depletion in deep ocean, causing mass extinction.
- Deep ocean water contains large amount of methane hydrate. Heating them up will release the potent green house gas into atmosphere.
The worst thing is above effects are self reinforcing, potentially generating run away positive feedback loop. For more information, see this.
Once the siphon is going, it'd keep going, right? Wouldn't that be... perpetual motion, as long as those pipe joints were kept perfectly sealed to avoid pressure loss when the water goes up the pipes?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Extracting power from a difference of 4C and 24C just isn't that productive. 20/277 = 0.07. So there's a 7% upper limit on efficiency. Realistically, you can get about half that out of a good Sterling cycle engine. Heat efficiency for a modern steam power plant is in the 50-70% range.
So you need ten to twenty times as much plant to get the same power output.
Ah, the old high school policy debate topic of 1997-1998 ... that brings me back.
The Ezine Directory
Do you have any idea how much space-time continuum there is in the universe?
I refuse to believe that on Slashdot, I could arrive this late to a thread and find out I was the first person who immediately thought of Asimov's Hugo Award-Winning novel.
The parallel being that (warning: spoilers of a book that's older than I am...), just like Estwald's folks were going to be screwed by our sun's supernova prematurely stopping the Electron Pump long before the equilibrium point, the changing temperature distribution of the ocean would probably screw everything up long, long before the energy well ran dry. Or totally maybe not, but the parallel is hard to miss.
No, I don't have any calculations on this; I'm on Slashdot, where posting timeliness, not accuracy, is key.
Very,very big is not infinite, if we take cold water out quicker than the oceans can cool we will have a huge problem. It is not the size of the pipes that are a worry but the number of them. My concern is that the rich countrys will implement this in a big way stand back and say look we have reduced greenhouse emmisions (which are blamed for global warming which has been measured by a rise in ocean temperature) but now the ocean is warming even faster cos we take too much cold water out so no one else should do this. As for windmills not stopping the wind if used heavily it will take energy from the wind just because it has no directly observable effect removing Gigawatts of enery from the atmosphere must have some effect somewhere. I'm not saying these are inherently bad ideas just that some caution needs to be used after all we humans have a history of moving problems rather than fixing them.
... that runs on water, man!! It's got a fiberglass aircooled engine and it runs on WATER! /Guilty Pleasure
ps: Maryann. Waay hotter.
I will put on the wacko-enviromentalist hat for a moment... ahem...(yes, I mean the minority fringe nut cases. Not all enviro freaks apply)
Humans are danger to the planet Earth. Humans are not natural, but just an ever growing virus.
We cannot work with nature. The only way to save the eccosystem is to kill every man, women, and child. We cannot trust the future of our planet to the Human race.
**going back to lab to design a killer virus**
Gee, you THINK something like that might be going on?
Life is not for the lazy.
Right, but is ocean water warm enough to boil water? would you call it "hot"? Even the surface water is often... cool.
These are all well known and exploited properties, since they're obviously a function of being alive. You also pretty much learn this stuff in the first high school chemistry class, if you're paying attention.
The generation of electricity using ocean temperature differentials, however, is a new thing, and thus shows how water is more awesome.
However, this isn't even the first new thing in the last two decades. Heavy water (deterium (sp?)) is extracted from seawater for nuclear fusion. Hydrogen fuel cells use ionization of water followed by oxidation reactions as a mechanism for storing and retrieving power with a much higher concentration of energy than more conventional batteries.
There are lots of compounds that we use every day that aren't looking more and more awesome, but which are pretty awesome to begin with. Silicon strikes me as one of those: we're pretty much using it's awesome semiconductor properties the same way over and over - which is awesome - but it's not getting more awesome
.
With all the new and exciting ways that we don't live off of it, water is surely moving closer to the top of "People Magazine's 100 most awesome compounds" list.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Not that I'm bitter or anything, but I submitted a story about OTEC to /. over a year ago and it was rejected.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
I'm sorry?
"external combustion engines"
"zero-pollution source"
Npe, that's not the way it works. Applying cold isn't going to be enough. It does require some external heat. The current companies working on large scale Sterling engines still plan on wood burning or dung burning to run them. Hardly zero pollution. You still need a greater thermal delta than cold to room temprature.
And their current technical problem, and why they haven't been but into use? Low reliability, blowing that claim out of the water too.
if we take cold water out quicker than the oceans can cool we will have a huge problem.
Clearly, you have no understanding of proportion at all. Go do the math.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
As other posts have pointed out, TFA describes the system as a large scale siphon. It would probably take some initial pumping to jump-start it, and perhaps a little bit to keep it running.. But it claims to basically pump it's self.
--- "End Of Line" - MCP
Long story short, it didn't work very well. My physics prof pointed out that the theoretical limit on their technology was
or about 10% where 303 is the boiling temperature in Kelvin and 273 the cold water temperature in Kelvin. After subtracting the various inefficiencies, there wasn't enough power left over to do anything with.All was not lost however, the Hawaiians ended up using the cold, nutrient rich water to feed aqua culture enterprises that would use it to grow lobster, abalone, kelp and nori (the seaweed you wrap sushi in.) Aqua culture was so successful that the farmers started sinking their own pipes because the state couldn't meet the demand for cold water.
They use an ammonia/water mixture for their working fluid, which presumably has a significantly lower boiling point. They might also apply a vacuum, which would also lower the boiling point.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Change in the Weather? Wind farms might affect local climates:. asp
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20041016/fob7
You mean Off Topic Extremist Comments? Why yes, of course.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Overclockers rejoice!
Warming deep ocean water may have all sorts of consequences, like changes in ocean currents, releases of nutrients and toxins, and harm to unique ecologies. Doing this on a massive scale seems in advisable.
I also fail to see the point. We just don't need more energy, we need to be more energy efficient and halt population growth.
That's where I know it from too. :)
Hello? This is slashdot.
Which brings up the question: why are you here?
"Nobody writes jokes in base 13." - Douglas Adams
Submitter deserves a golf clap for getting a Slashdot story accepted with a Fark headline.
I thought baby drool was the universal solvent.
If they've solved that problem, then it definitely has a chance of making a huge global impact.
I can imagine that on a micro scale this could be quiet beneficial (ie clean & cheap).
:)
On the macro scale, though? What effect would it have on things like sea temperature, the sub-ocean ecology (that really we know quite little about)?
My mind is drawn back to a slashdot article some time ago about a computer simulation of what would happen if wind turbines were used to generate all the worlds power. I'm too damn lazy to look up the article but, as I recall, it could be described as catastrophic.
I'm not sure I like the idea of messing with the earths temperature regulator on a large scale.
I saw The Day After Tomorrow
IANA physicist but I understand that the rising water will accelerate with enough force to allow power generation. There is an ecological issue about creating artificial nutrient blooms but it may not be substantial and in any case will show itself pretty quickly.
I prefer I like the same idea applied to air - plus it works in inland areas. Tested in Spain and planned for inland Australia are very large chimney structures that should produce large amounts of power very cleanly.
The advantage of the air towers is that thermals occur naturally everywhere everyday so the ecological implications of harnessing the movement of the heated air would be very small.
The aesthetic implications are a matter of taste but I like the idea.
Maybe I'm being naive here, but wouldn't this kinda fuck up the things living in that freezing water down there? Not to mention screwing around with oceam currents? I'm hoping that they have detailed environmental impact studies before undertaking any more such projects, though this would be difficult considering that we know sweet FA about the ecology of the deep sea.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
It sure would be awesome if someone did build one though. Anyone know if Dubai has a continental shelf? :-)
fish and pipes
a ton of salt water spilling onto land would ruin it no?
This could have a very bad result?
Also won't sediment build up in the pipes over time and how would you open it to clean it out?!
Water has always been more amazing that what people have thought. The fact is that very little is still fully understood about water and that there is much mystery still surrounding it and much research still being put into it.
;)
For instance homeopathy for medicine, whether you believe it or not, have at least confirmed the 'memory' property of water.
Then there is also the case of highly pure (ultrapure) water being able to disolve (corrode) stainless steen and even glass.
We cannot claim something to be suddenly amazing about water until we find it to be mundane first.
Okay, lets say for a moment that there are 6 billion people on the planet, and each one is going to consume 4 liters of ocean water every MINUTE for purpose of cooling, which would be like trying to cool yourself off by running a shower 24/7 at full blast. Then, considering that there are about 1.34x10^21 liters of ocean water in the oceans, this is about 0.001% of the ocean's water being cycled through in an entire year. And that's about as extreme as it could possibly get.
In reality, this would only be practical for a portion of the population, and so its usage would never reach this.
Is Craven's idea to build cooling towers to 'harvest' freshwater really that good?
If you remove enough water from the air, you'll affect the local climate: eventually it'll rain less. Or would a lower RH be compensated for by increased evaporation?
640 meter diameter wide pipes is enough for anybody.
The article and the POEMS site talk about 'virtually unlimited', but is it really? Eventually, all the hot water being pumped down will heat up the oceans, making the temperature differential too small for Craven's ideas to work.
This is probably less of an issue than with geothermal energy (which uses the same principle on land), where a 'well' becomes useless after about 20 years of use, but still.
Ocean thermal energy poses no more hazard of disrupting ocean currents, than windmills do of stopping the wind.
Nor do exhausts from vehicles and factories pose any hazard to the atmosphere, nor pulling water from underground affecting water tables.
Ocean thermal energy poses no more hazard of disrupting ocean currents, than windmills do of stopping the wind.
Holy crap, windmills are stopping the wind!?!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Correct. The grandparent poster should read the article and notice that nowhere did it say that the sweat irrigation was to be derived from buried pipes. It even went so far as to describe one of his PVC cold water pipe sweat condensers in detail, noting that it was out in the open.
t ml?pg=3&topic=craven&topic_set=
"Irrigation:
Pipes carrying cold water run beneath fields of crops, sweating freshwater to irrigate plants and chilling their roots, promoting faster crop cycles."
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/craven.h
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
I remember going thru stacks of 70's era popular science's (or maybe popular mechanics) and coming across schemes by boeing and/or lockhead to build super deep thermal difference engines, using the temperature difference to vaporize and condense ammonia while pushing the ammonia thru gas turbines. Sounds like this guy has figured out a way to do so from the comfort of an island.
Also, being able to cheaply cool spaces in tropical climates can't hurt.
Bacardi + slashdot = negative karma.
There we go again, the entropy slaves we are. Allways following the flow, diffusing energy and material. And allways increasing the speed with which we can do so..
... for Commu^H^H^H^H^H Terrorists who will SAP and IMPURIFY all of our precious BODILY FLUIDS!!
Y'know this stuff sounds good and it's practically free and just lying there waiting to be used - mind you, I bet some enterprising company will put it in bottles with fancy labels, hype it up to make it 'special' and gullible fools will ACTUALLY PAY STUPID PRICES FOR IT.
AT&ROFLMAO
Alcohol absorbs thc, you're filtering all the good out o yer weed.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Yes, yes, calm down everybody.
There are good reasons to be sceptical when somebody starts talking about fantastical solutions right under our noses and 'unlimited energy'. There is no such thing as unlimited energy. Period.
I remember when I was a kid in the 60s - we were just starting to hear about pollution, and those in power said 'Come on, how can anything we dump in the sea or air have a global effect'. Now we know that pollution is a huge global problem.
Then it was overfishing, extinctions, loss of habitats etc - and we're seeing it and realising what devastating effects these things will have.
And then of course global warming and then end of cheap energy - there are still some that are in denial, but most have now realised that it happens, and that we are to blame.
In all of these cases people didn't want to see that we humans reach the limits of any resources very quickly - the same will happens to this supposedly 'unlimited energy', even if the science part of it is not bogus. We simply have to stop wasting more and more resources.
In Finland and Denmark they use what is called District Heating and District Cooling , which improve the efficiency of power stations to 80%->90%. Instead of just dumping this "waste" heat they've created they pump it round homes and businesses or use it to power district cooling systems where cold water is pumped round houses and businesses in summer. It does still end up in the environment but it's at least useful first.
Deleted
>alcohol absorbs thc
Oh. I never actually tried Jose Cuervo in a bong, I just thought it sounded funny.
Serves me right.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Sterling is a currency, or a grade of silver.
l /TechnologyAndInitiative.aspx?id=30
The larger the temperature gradient the higher the efficiency of the engine. But then, if you are getting the temperature gradient essentially for free, the efficiency isn't your most important consideration. There are Stirling engines which will run on the temperature gradient between the palm of your hand and ambient air.
e.g.
http://www.stirlingengine.com/
Powergen (a UK power company) are rolling out Stirling engines across the country. Replacing conventional central heating boilers with a product they call Whispergen, a Stirling engine.
e.g.
http://www.powergen.co.uk/pub/Dom/A/ui/Residentia
I can't comment on the inability of others to build a reliable engine.
Deleted
I wonder how *much* of this can be done before it warms the deep ocean to an unacceptable degree. Obviously, the small Mariana project isn't going to be a problem -- the ocean is a really BIG heat sink, and Saipan is pretty small. But the article talks breathlessly about meeting the whole world's energy needs, and I'm a lot less sure about that. Wouldn't that warm up the deep oceans of the world by a few degrees? Talk about global warming...
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
You must use a spellchecker before you can get any respect. It's "bologna" you insensitive clod!
With that small a difference it's doubtful you can generate enough power to break-even. After all, you have to run the pumps to pump up the cold water. That's not a trivial amount of energy-- water is heavy and it's waaay down there.
I'm too lazy to do the spreadsheet math right now, but a rough estimate says you can't even break even on the energy, even with an ideal turbine using some ideal working fluid that vaporizes at just the right temperature.
And any economically viable scheme has to not only be above break-even, it has to generate enough benefits to pay for the equipment and labor. Have you priced the cost of a 5,000 foot long sewer pipe recently? How's about a turbine that can extract useful power from a 40 degree F difference? Yowsa.
On another, kind of related topic. What keeps the mantle of the Earth so hot? Is it in a perpetual state of cooling since the Earths formation? Is it a PV=nRT thing, where the pressure is just creating the high temperatures? I ask because, what if we started using the heat from the core for our energy, if we have enough places where that heat is extracted wouldn't there be a possibility of lowering the temperature of the core, possibly even to the point of making it solid? Would having a solid core be bad? Maybe we are several orders of magnitude from being able to extract that much energy at this point.
You can _waste_ unlimited energy by pumping water from the dephts of the ocean...
Is it just me or does this sound like the kind of headline normally found in the Onion?
As usual, thermodynamics manages to muck things up. If it were energetically favourable for water to do this sort of thing, then it would have already done it. If you have a column of salty water at uniform temnperature, then the salt concentration takes up a Boltzmann distribution. The bottom of the oceans are saltier than the top, and so the pressure is never enough to force the reverse osmosis.
A similar truth exists for heat. We will need to force the cold water to the surface, or the hot water to the depths. If there were lots of energy to be got from warming the deep oceans, then this would probably have already happened.
This does not mean the proposal is not sound. If you are close to deep oceans, then keeping stuff cool is a lot cheaper and more energy efficient then your typical closed cycle refrigerator, or water evaporator.
Getting dew from the air may not be easy. The driest town in the world is in Chile, on the coast.
Because warm water rises, as the cold water heats up to the warmer surrounding ocean water, it expands and rises, pushing up more of the cold water with it.
Maybe shove some fins on it, to get it to exchange the heat faster.
Not for power, but for aquaculture. (the water is very nutrient-ritch).
You could have massive fish-farms pretty cheaply for all that. (just convert a lake which is close to the coast into a fishery).
Mandrake, have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation?
ATTFA, they use a vacuum.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
would be to use the system in Southern California (LA, San Deigo, etc.) and farm the Central Valley using the water that is currently being sent south. Every farmer could just stick a pump in the aqueduct and irrigate their crops. San Francisco's tree-huggers could get the Hetch-hetchy (sp) valley back as a bonus.
Hey, it's even possible that the Colorado River might make it to the Pacific Ocean on a regular basis again.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
I also fail to see the point. We just don't need more energy, we need to be more energy efficient and halt population growth.
The point which you do not see is that, regardless of how much energy we do or do not need or use, this would (assuming the theory is correct) provide a clean, renewable energy source, which we can substitute for currently-used unclean or non-renewable energy sources. Unless you're planning to argue that we should reduce our energy use to what present clean/renewable sources can provide--an argument I don't think you'll find much support for--I assume you can see the reason for developing such an alternative.
You still have to move the cold water up from however many hundreds of feet down, probably taking more energy than you can efficently extract from the temperature differential. I'm confused over the "hose pipe siphon" analogy: If I place a hose pipe in an above-ground pool, I can siphon water out because the net change in elevation is negative; if I move the end of the pipe above the lip of the pool, no water comes out. Oh, and the highest capilparly column you can have is about a metre...
;)
So, goo idea for air conditioning, but not a practical source of energy...
Simon
Living organisms evolved and adapted to the properties of water, not the other way around. Duh.
.
If we keep pumping out water from deep sea, wouldn't result in heating up of sea?
He should learn about the Golden Path, before humanity is doomed forever!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
I've been hearing about this damn thing for 30 fucking years. If the fucker works, plug the god damn thing in and lets go to it.
Where are all these fucking energy things we've been hearing about for the last 3 decades? I know where fusion is, but where is wave power? What about the oil shade?
Please, shut the fuck up and do something.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
After all, you have to run the pumps to pump up the cold water. That's not a trivial amount of energy
Except that it is. IANAP, but imagine this:
You have a full tub of water, say 1 meter deep. You then take a relatively thin pipe 1m long and stick it in the tub, so that the bottom of the pipe is 10cm above the bottom of the tub. Result: water fills the pipe to the 90cm level.
You now take a cup and remove some water from the top of the tub. The water level in the tub falls to 100-x cm, and at the same time the water level in the pipe (relative to the bottom of the pipe) falls to 90-x cm--the levels are equal relative to the bottom of the tub.
Now imagine that you took that water from the top of the pipe instead. Just as before, the water level in the tub will fall to 100-x cm, and the water level in the pipe will rise to 90-x cm to match. But where did the water that entered the pipe come from? Assuming the pipe's walls don't let any water through, it can only come from the bottom of the tub.
So if, for example, you took out 50cm of water from the pipe, you would have (looking from the top down) the remaining 40cm of water that was originally in the pipe followed by 50cm of water from the bottom of the tub. Obviously there would be some mixing involved, but if that bothers you just imagine taking out all 90cm at once.
Why does this happen? Because (if I remember my old physics lectures correctly) as you remove water from the pipe, there's suddenly less downward pressure on the water remaining in the pipe than there is on the water in the rest of the tub. This results in water entering the pipe in order to reduce the pressure differential.
Now, maybe things aren't that simple when you're talking about oceans and several thousand meters of distance, but you should only have to spend enough energy to get water off the top of the pipe--physics will take care of the rest.
(As an afterthought, how about this alternative experiment: Stick a straw down to the bottom of the ocean and drink--it shouldn't take any more effort than drinking from an ordinary cup.)
...New York City.
For all we know, there might be other sources of power from the depths of the Hudson.
You put the pump at the bottom, that way the pressure is slightly higher in the pipe than outside, and the walls are under tension , not compression. Its much easier to build that than a pipe that won't collapse under suction.
Do it like that and 100m pipes are easy.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
So, they'll be pumping salt water from 3,000 below the surface, purifying it then using it as a power source, cooling, fresh water to name a few. What happens to all the salt during the purification process? Is it any concern at all? Surely short term there will be no effect, but over the long term?
The three eyed fish from the simpsons :-P
Everyone seems to be missing the point.
1) You pump the water up, using a lot of energy.
2) You circulate that water around in various heat exchangers, but it *never leaves the pipes* and is never exposed to anything.
3) The water goes back down - recovering almost all of the enrgy required to get it up, only losing the friction costs.
So, all you've done is warm the water up a bit, and use a little energy to overcome friction.
Zero Point just needs funding!
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
Hey Rene, I knew we wouldn't see a post about Canadian Helath care without you chiming in with your bullshit posts.
I normally like to attack your dubious posts about how your whole family was murdered by Canadian health care, but really, no one believes your tales. Suffice it to say, that knowing a large number of health care professionals, on both sides of the border, you have a tendency to overstate the quality of care in the US (especially in relation to the cost of the care), and understate the quality in Canada. The only thing missing from your usual speach, is how you insited on tiping the Canadaian Emergency room doctor for seeing your child, because you didn't want to feel indebeted to the Canadian system.
Alas, shooting holes in your story, has become all too easy. So lets look at your tax numbers.
Income: US$30k/CA$37.5k US Tax: US$2235/CA$2794 CA Tax: US$5068/CA$6335
Last year I was almost bang on these figures for income (I only had full time employment from May until January). I am a resident of Ontario, just as in your example. Now, I made NO RRSP contributions (that would have reduced my tax payable by about another 1200CAD), I have no dependants to claim, I have no medical deductions, I have no investment losses to claim. Basically, I am the worlds easiest tax return, I have employment income from a single source, I have no deductions, except for the basic personal amount that all Canadians qualify for.
Now my tax payable last year was about 4000CAD (3200US), total, Federal and Provincial. So what is wrong with your calculations? You seem to be overstating the Canadian tax burden by, well, better than 50%? So, Rene, tell me, what kind of health care can you buy in the US for 1200 CAD? Thats 960US using your rates.
Oh, and remember, if I had two children, my payable would be LESS than what I did pay. So lets assume that my taxes stay EXACTLY where they are (they wouldn't, as I would get more deductions for the dependants). What kind of health care could I buy for four (the two children, and the non-working spouse) people for US960 a year?
I do not know the answer, because it doesn't concern me. But somehow, I doubt there are many carriers providing full heath coverage for four people for under 1000 US. I could be wrong, but I doubt the cost of health care in the US would be a huge social issue if you could get coverage for four people for less than a hundred dollars a month. My car insurance is more expensive than that.
Why is my payable so much less than your numbers? I don't know. My brother (a CA, thats CPA to those in the US) does my taxes. There are no tricks or loopholes involved, just following the tax code.
What is wrong with your numbers? I have no idea. All I do know, is your story is, once again, full of shit.
There is another link that is a bit more, in depth, pardon the pun.
On a large scale I'd be very worried about the effect, particularly the effect on currents and deep sea ecology.
Like wind energy, it's indirect solar, which is nice because you're harvesting the energy gathered from a large area in naturally concentrated form. But if you're drawing a significant fraction (or in the case of this system potentially more than it is actively collecting) you're going to have consequences. However a relative few installations which draw upon a negligible fraction of that energy should be OK. This sounds like an excellent way to make remote islands economically sustainable.
As for fusion power, I've seen research that suggests no human-scale system may be able to break even due to brehmstralung. Nuclear has issues, fossil fuel is unsustainable, wind hydro and ocean have potential environmental issues.
The best solution is solar, which is the ultimate source of all power anyway. Some folks claim that there's simply not enough room on earth to sustain our demand. If that's true it says a lot about our wastefulness. However, the best reply to that is "Who said anything about earth?" Space-based solar power is basically limitless, or at least can collect more power than the earth can dissipate as heat effectively. And unlike ground based systems, it can provide constant power regardless of weather, season, or time of day.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
That Canada et alia have a "social welware system" is not a good reason that the United States follow their inferior example.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
I've read all the links in comments rated 5+ and still don't understand how we get energy from coldness.
There was a diagram on wired but it didn't help much with the basics. How does this work? The wired article didn't even refer to the process with words I could google for.
A blog I run for the wealth
This reminds me of Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps by Marshall T. Savage. He proposed using off-shore OTECs (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion) to power a floating island of sorts.
The process would purify/desalinate drinking water and would provide conditioning. As for corp growth, well, Savage's plan is more aquaculture-based, but it would increase food production - cultivate spirulina which has numerous health effects.
Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps
Anybody know how to invest in the corporation which is implementing this man's ideas? I have a few thousand dollars and could use some 'green karma' in my portfolio.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
It's great to see a huge energy implementation using that principle.
Two fish swim into a wall, one turns to the other and says, "Dam".
We polluted the air, land and oceans. Now we're going to destroy the seabeds too. Great!
you're assuming that consumption is distributed evenly across the oceans. more likely, it will be much more concentrated in areas within a few km of coastal cities, probably a very small percentage of a percent of the world's ocean water. who knows what kind of effects it would have on sea life, plankton levels, bacteria, etc., but it's entirely possible for it to cause some sort of chaotic disturbance of global proportion. whether or not it will is unknown, however to deny that there is a possibility is to bury one's head in the sand. it certainly deserves more investigation.
1:13 - Try Jose Cuervo.
9:42 - Alcohol absorbs thc, you're filtering all the good out o yer weed.
hmm, 8 hours gap. I bet there's at least one poor sod trying to work out if he should drink his bong Tequila...
This sig all sigs devours
Just cause the parent doesn't suffer fools gladly and is sarcastic and insulting to them doesn't make it a flame.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Kiss my Red White and Blue ass.
Another Moose hugging, America sucks pundit.
Glad to see I came to read informed comments about coastal farming only to be subjected to tripe like this again.
SHEESH.......
You just have to install the device on the southern hemisphere of the earth, and the water will rush down the pipe acceleratingly. Duh!
I thought the correct term was "hydrogen hydroxide"...
Its actually requires very little energy, since once the flow is going it only needs to maintain it. A nearly 50 degree difference is actually quite a bit. Think about how much energy it takes to keep your house at 80 degrees when it is 32 outside. Sorry but your logic is tragically flawed. Is this the be all end all, no, but it does offer the potential to be a major boon to mainly energy and hydrogen production. Fresh water and farming is a extra benefit.
<positive>
I'm positive that you will never experience any such evolutionary traits that I have attained. Heil Duh-arwin!
</positive>
To confirm you're not a script, please type the text shown in this image: atkdtvn
Its the SUN! RTFA, it uses the water from the top of the ocean (heated by the sun, yes the sun, solar power) to create the power differential. So in essence its not perpetual in the true sense, it has a power source, the big fireball in the sky.
Man, some people are so bitter and negative.
...on World populations; all the concentrated centers of population are devestated by tidal wave threats, earthquakes, and storms; they're on the front of the ocean and its tectonic plates; the atmosphere is desirable, but time conceals the history of soil. Nothing built for dense occupation by hu-man(s?) has once ever held together from any natural phenomenon. The sparse population inland is the god-loving, peace/love/groovy agriculture and horticulture type that are most likely to be killed first; they reap and sell the fat of the land to the people densly populating the favorited areas, and terrorists or foreign-militaries strategize on spiking the food-source of the greater population.
I'm here in southern California, and the refuge I see from any disaster whether political or natural; get my ass into the Sea of Cortez with enough weaponry, equipment, food, and live off the fish and iguanas: get as far away from the hell of starvation as possible, those densly populated areas. It takes no less than three acres of non-irrigated precision-farmed land to sustain a single one-hundred-and-fifty pound man and that is cutting it close for the lard-asses I see today.
without prejudice
The other factoid is the 2Km-long test pipe cost $11M. Generously assuming there's 100 MW of heat going thru the pipe, at 2% efficiency thats 2 megawatts of electricity, which is only about $50/hr's worth, or $450,000 per year. Assume you need 5 employees at $50K/yr, that eats up 250K of your profit. It's hard to pay off a $11M loan when your income is less than one tenth the interest cost.
They have a pipe on Japan's Kume coast pumping up deep-sea water, and an institute devoted to trying to figure out what to do with it.
Mostly they desalinate it and sell it as very expensive bottled water... they also look at what kind of critters get sucked up the pipe.
You can't take the sky from me...
A high standard of living can only come from high levels of production.
Absolutely not. Sufficient production to meet the stated needs can produce the desired standards if distributed correctly.
If you don't make stuff, you don't have stuff.
Absolutely irrelevant. Having stuff != quality life.
A government which by means of high taxes discourages production, also discourages wealth creation.
Wealth != products. Wealth != money. "High Taxes " (which Canada does not have btw) is does does not discourage "production". Private Capital, in an effort to remain private *may* move to a geography with lower taxes -- but this is a result of an INSUFFICIENTLY regulated market/too-free-trade.
Well, the 100-meter figure was what sprung to mind as "much bigger than any pipe would actually be."
It's probably possible to build a 100-meter pipe, but it would likely require some internal bracing.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Your analogies are false.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It seems to me to make much more sense to put the actual plant out in the deep ocean, like an oil platform, and then just pump fresh water and electricity through pipes to the mainland. You lose the benefit of the free air-conditioning, but you're much less likely to run afoul of nimbyism if your cubic-kilometer turbines are out of sight.
The more I think about this, the more practical it seems. A trillion dollar 2% efficient engine that breaks down once a month will never break even. A trillian dollar 0.1% efficient engine that breaks down once every ten years is an express highway to a post-scarcity world.
fish and pipes
I have often thought that myself, how water could be useful in other ways: http://www.newpath4.com/drivingfromnewyorktohollyw ood_thecarsizesteamengine.htm ... It might could even have explosive proerties under the right set of conditions: http://www.newpath4.com/HybridEngine_HybridGrenade .gif . Just some water for thought, something to TOSS AROUND, see if it drives: http://www.newpath4.com/HybridEngine_HybridGrenade _Explodes_FasterThanThought.gif .
The U.S. should send all its commies up to Canada in exchange for hard workers to come down to the U.S.
You could've hired me.
Actually, thinking about it, the pump at the bottom only has to provide a pressure differential big enough to stop the walls collapsing, and you put another pump at the top where its easier to service. You could probably do the bottom bit with an array of small motors with standard propellors on them. Put a few extra on to provide redundancy and make them robotically swappable/retrievable.
Also the reason you would have a pipe that big is that you definately want the flow rate to be low enough to maintain laminar flow. Turbulance would kill your efficiency. Getting them to the surface would be easy, just attach a parachute and let them go in the tube.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
I was thinking huge pipe = huge pump, but of course, you're right. An army of small robotic pumps would be much easier to develop. Weights to go down, parachutes to go up, tiny propellers to steer into their position in the massively-redundant power grid at the bottom.
Actually, I'm wondering if it wouldn't be better to hook each one on a steel wire, so they could be literally yanked up from the surface when they broke down. I don't know if lots of wires in the pipe would cause turbulance though.
fish and pipes
An inner smaller one, containing the seawater and made out of some sort of highly conductive, non-corrosive metal. An outer one, much larger, with holes punched in it, open at the ends of the field, to draw in air and condense water out of the air. Maybe even a small electric fan to blow more air through the system. Bury the large pipe in the middle, and put your grapes on top of it.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Or, alternately, a metal grill on the other end with a suitable amount of charcoal and you've got a food source too. Mmm... endangered species flesh. Can I interest you in some baby harp seal patties? It goes wonderfully with the bald eagle liver pâté...
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