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Giant Snake-Shaped Generators Could Capture Wave Power
Roland Piquepaille writes "UK researchers have developed a prototype of a future giant rubber tube which could catch energy from sea waves. The device, dubbed Anaconda, uses 'long sea waves to excite bulge waves which travel along the wall of a submersed rubber tube. These are then converted into flows of water passing through a turbine to generate electricity.' So far, the experiments have been done with tubes with diameters of 0.25 and 0.5 meters. But if the experiments are successful, future full-scale Anaconda devices would be 200 meters long and 7 meters in diameter, and deployed in water depths of between 40 and 100 meters. An Anaconda would deliver an output power of 1MW (enough to power 2,000 houses). These devices would be deployed in groups of 20 or even more providing cheap electricity without harming our environment."
'long sea waves to excite bulge waves which travel along the wall of a submersed rubber tube. These are then converted into flows of water passing through a turbine to generate electricity.'
and called the anaconda?
i don't know if this scheme will work, but hands down, that is the most sexual innuendo i've heard in an energy generation scheme in a long time
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And has a fairly small footprint for a 20 Megawatt solution - might be a good fit for small to moderate coastal towns.
I just want to see the boat captain who wanders unknowingly into a field of these things at night. Snakes on a boat!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I didn't see anything in TFA, but one wonders if they've considered sediment buildup around the device. Do they have some way to keep sand/sediment from burying the machine?
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
I saw this yesterday, and using nature to generate energy is absolutely right. Think outside the paradigm, generate energy everywhere, use less of it everywhere... this is the solution, no single answer will work, it takes all efforts and answers. Anywhere the universe creates energy, we should be able to harness and use it. This is the grail, holy or not, energy for nothing.... or close to that.
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motherfucking snake generators on the motherfucking grid!
These devices would be deployed in groups of 20 or even more providing cheap electricity without harming our environment."
I think this underestimates the ability of someone, somewhere being able to find a problem with anything. Hydropower dams wild rivers. Windmills smack birds out of the air. Photovoltaics pave over entire deserts. Probably Anacondas will interfere with the lifecycle of some species or other. One day we'll realize that any energy system is going to have some ill effects and say, "Intercourse the penguins, I need to microwave my popcorn."
There are about 30+ companies that exist, which capture 'wave' power. Two to come to mind are Ocean Power Technologies & Blue Energy, though to me, Blue Energy's method seems more efficient since it uses predictable current, rather than waves, to generate power.
But this shows a better image.
Right now, the sky-high price for oil is useful in reminding us that there are limits to our resources. If we do not make a conscientious effort to control population growth, then nature will impose a solution on us. That solution will be poverty and likely starvation. If you doubt what I say, consider the huge amounts of energy that is needed to grow and to transport food.
Right now, I suspect that our population is unsustainably large due to the fact that we still have plentiful supplies of non-renewable sources (e.g., oil and uranium). So, our energy consumption = (1) usuable energy from non-renewable sources + (2) usuable energy from renewable sources. After #1 is depleted by roughly 2100 (?), a global world war for resources will dwarf the calamity of World War II. (By the way, we will deplete our mineral resources like copper and iron ore long before we deplete our non-renewable sources of energy.)
Will humankind wake up to the problem of overpopulation? In the USA, political correctness prevents us from dealing with the problem. The American mantra is that (1) expanding the population is always wonderful and (2) expanding the population by immigration is the best route.
Sure, CO2 from generating electricty might be a problem. But no matter how you slice it, using energy contributes to climate change in various ways.
If you believe that humans are causing the climate to change, the answer is fewer humans. Lots fewer. You can argue that before 1850 humans (all 50 million or so of them) had negligible effects on the climate. After that, well there has been an effect.
Continued growth of human population is going to be having a greater and greater effect. There is no getting away from it.
just go nuclear and conserve
going nuclear should give us enough time to figure out fusion. and if we don't, it's curtains
but renewables: geothermal, wind, tidal, etc... it's all tiny fractions of demand
except for solar. but that's a huge infrastructure outlay
nuclear is the best option before us to kick our hydrocarbon habit
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Ocean Power Catches a Wave
"The first commercial ocean energy project is scheduled to launch this summer off the coast of Portugal. Three snakelike wave-power generators built by Edinburgh's Pelamis Wave Power will deliver 2.25 megawatts through an undersea cable to the Portuguese coastal town of Aguçadoura. Within a year, another 28 generators should come online there, boosting the capacity to 22.5 MW. That may be a trickle of power, but the project represents a new push into wave and tidal power as governments eye the oceans as a way to meet their renewable energy targets."
One simple rule for its versus it's
Where "long run" means a thousand years, yes. Why are we looking that far forward anyway? Whaats the point about saying we have too many people while new methods of energy generation are constantly being built?
While solar power in all forms is the only thing we know has a high probability of being around in a billion years, nuclear power will last us, at the least, 300 years. Even the pessimists can agree that we'll have nuclear fusion within 200 years. So thats it! nuclear fusion until nuclear fission is sorted out. All of man's energy needs in a simple two step plan!
poverty! global war! starvation! calamity! our population is unsustainable!
will you please stop mongering fear and get realistic!? And don't event start with the "nuclear waste" blather because nuclear power can safely generate enough energy to make chemicals to launch all waste into the sun and have all the energy we'll need left over!
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Will you please stop with this "nuclear waste" blather? "Nuclear waste" is just "nuclear fuel that we're too lame to recycle yet".
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Now take the remaining farmland in the US, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. Don't convert an acre of forest, park, or city. No mountains, or prairies. Only the existing farmland. You can grow enough food for everyone (via a vegetarian diet).
Now take the fresh water outflow of the Columbia river - the river separating Washington from Oregon. You've got 27 gallons of fresh water per person per day.
Now put 700 nuclear plants in the deserts of Nevada. You have enough power for everyone to live at the energy consumption level of the US.
Go do the research, you'll see this all to be true. We could support every single person on the face of the earth within 40% of the North American continent. No one on any other continent, island, or waterway.
There aren't too many people; the issue is distribution of the resources. That is a political - not scientific - problem. We could feed the world and provide fresh water for everyone, if we could get countries to agree.
And note that it is almost always the country that would benefit that restricts the offer of aid. Think Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Turkmenistan, North Korea. Those countries are stricken with poverty because of the G8 or the first world; they are stricken because twisted, maniacal leaders are power-drunk.
Overpopulated? Not by a long shot. Poor distribution? Sure. The solution is to encourage free and expanded trade - and in some cases like Zimbabwe and Myanmar - a few well placed bullets. Economic growth is required to free more people.
And when there's more people with freedom and no longer having to worry about their next meal, or their next drink of water, you'll find a lot more participation in solving other big problems facing the world.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Thank God someone finally gave Sir Mix-a-Lot the long overdue credit he richly deserves as a true environmentalist, humanitarian, and supporter of renewable bun energy extraction technologies. It's about time we broke the oil cartels' blockage on innovation and hooked up generators to all those pulsating rumps!
I say, let them do all the side bends and situps they want, since the calories expending in diminishing that rump will surely guide us into a new era of plentiful energy for all.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
In the long run, the only readily available sources of energy are renewable sources: solar energy and terrestrial energy (e.g., wind and waves).
Almost all of the energy we use comes from the sun, with nuclear and geothermal being (the) exceptions. The main difference is whether we're using the energy as the sun is producing it (wind, wave, solar) or we're using energy that's been stored from previous eons of sunlight (coal, oil). So I agree with what you're saying insofar as we shouldn't be using more energy than the sun is giving us right now, and we should strive to make that come from the current energy output rather than stored output.
Right now, the sky-high price for oil is useful in reminding us that there are limits to our resources.
(By the way, we will deplete our mineral resources like copper and iron ore long before we deplete our non-renewable sources of energy.)
But I'm going to have to disagree with you here. We will never actually run out of copper or iron or oil. As the amount of these resources that is naturally occurring decreases, the price will rise to the point that: (A) It becomes cost-efficent to dig through landfills and recycle previously used resources, and (B) other materials that were previously too expensive for the application will now be cost-effective.
Not to mention that in my post I noted we could supply ALL our energy needs with nuclear. No need for crude oil for basically none of our energy requirements.
Oil was a cheap and high density power source; in the 1800s we used it because nuclear wasn't an option. Now we can use nuclear for most power needs, and use petroleum for whatever else (like plastics, high-density requirements like airplanes, etc).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
It would take a huge investment in infrastructure to be able to "use up" nuclear material to the state where it is reasonably harmless to life. By comparison, increasing renewable energy generation can be done in a fairly incremental fashion (and can be moved & removed in a fairly incremental fashion as well).
Also, "nuclear waste" doesn't just include the nuclear fuel. It also includes everything which comes in contact with that nuclear fuel & all of ways that it is processed (like the containers used to store/transport the fuel, the reactor walls, the control rod mechanisms, etc). Almost all that material can't be safely used once it has become contaminated, the stuff that it is contaminated with can't be easily extracted for use as fuel, and it is all still hazardous to life.
I'm not saying that nuclear isn't theoretically a great source of energy, but you're seriously downplaying some of its disadvantages.
Oh I dont know, I seem to find the US population extremely dense, I mean they voted for Bush.....
Zimbabwe's a particularly good example; they once had a fairly decent country. Grew enough food for themselves and enough to export to other starving African countries.
Let's solve that, seize all the farms, hand them to people who don't know a damned thing about farming or owning a business, let them rip up the irrigation and sell it as scrap metal and boom! you've got a few people making a lot of money, one time, rather than a good bit year by year, and instead of a fed populous exporting food you've got a starving populous begging to import food.
I'd wager that Zimbabwe ALONE is more responsible for increased demand on global food supplies than biofuels.. so stop cryin about *that*.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
There aren't too many people; the issue is distribution of the resources. That is a political - not scientific - problem. We could feed the world and provide fresh water for everyone, if we could get countries to agree.
I see. Political Science... isn't?
And if you think that moving everybody to Texas and getting the water from Oregon down to Texas and building 700 nukular power plants is a POLITICAL problem, you have a gross misestimation of reality.
Yes, politics plays a key role in wealth inequity, but this is also a severe issue of engineering and resource management.
Yes, in a purely mathematical world, you could move everybody to Texas, and water then with just the water from XYZ river. But how do you distribute those 26 gallons of water per day? Can you imagine how much plumbing and energy it would take to distribute that kind of water? How many millions of miles of piping to lay?
How many trees it would take to build those kinds of houses, roads to transport the trees, mills to process the trees...
That's the problem with overly simplistic models that simply divide the number of people by XYZ (usually Texas) and figure that's the problem.
The truth is that if you were born in the United States, you inherited almost a MILLION DOLLARS of wealth at current market value in public infrastructure: roads, power lines, schools, libraries, police buildings, fire equipment, telecommunications capabilities, rail lines, and so on, all of which give you the ability to do some small piece and earn (on average) about 7% on your public "net worth" as personal income.
That's how come it's so much harder to become wealthy in the 3rd world - the infrastructure needed to support the widespread creation of wealth simply doesn't exist.
I digress.
So you have a city with a population density that at least compares to most cities, the size of Texas. Can you imagine what the quality of life would be like near Killeen? (the middle)
People live where the resources are available, where distribution is cheap to free, where the quality of life is something to enjoy. I like being able to walk through a park that isn't packed every 10 feet with another person. The feeling of isolation, the curiosity at watching a water snake swim.
I agree with your general conclusion, that the problem is largely political, and that the 3rd world could become much happier with effective leadership. But I don't like that you use such overly simplistic models to support your conclusion!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I think you completely missed the point: the GP stated we were overpopulated, when demonstrably that is false. If you can support every single person in such a small area as Texas, and with the resources of just 40% of one continent, then how are we overpopulated? I guess that sailed right over your head...
I wasn't advocating moving everyone to Texas, merely pointing out that there isn't a population problem. Provably so. Unless you want to show otherwise? Clearly we have the resources to support everyone.
And if that is the case, then the fact that millions die each month from starvation must be because of some reason other than there are too many of them.
Take a look at Zimbabwe. 25 years ago, they were a net exporter of food, and starvation within Zimbabwe was unheard of. Jobs were plentiful. Education was free and open to all, and the country was quite peaceful.
Now? Zimbabwe can't even grow 20% of its own food. It's economy has been so wrecked that inflation is running at 10 MILLION percent annually. Prices double daily. Unless your wages increase at a higher rate - which they don't - you simply cannot survive.
How to solve problems like that? Well, you can try trade. It works for most places that give it a try. Grow the pie, everyone wins. But many places don't want or care for free trade and you get Myanmar, and Zimbabwe, and Haiti, and North Korea.
You want to solve those problems? You're not going to do it by talking. The rulers of those countries don't give a shit about the people. They are simply cattle to be used; in fact, in Haiti and Zimbabwe, cattle are worth more than people. I know, I've been to both.
So how to you negotiate with those bastards? They have everything they want. They have absolute control, they have air conditioned palaces, plenty to eat, and people to shoot and flay for sport. What can we offer them other than a restriction in what they do now?
You want to be humanitarian to the suffering people in those countries? You won't do it by providing food and money - that will just go to the thug running the place, guaranteed. You can support an insurgency, but that will take time, cost thousands - if not millions - of lives, and may not work.
Or you simply send in a few teams and in the course of a day or two eliminate the thugs. Eliminate the threat. Set up a government, and work to rebuild the country. It's worked every time we've tried it: Philippines, Japan, Germany, Iraq. Yes, Iraq.
You say I should grow up? I have, and I've been to those places. Ever run the pharmacy of a medical clinic in the hills around Dessalines, Haiti? Build water pumps in Kadoma, Zimbabwe? Distribute US Constitutions while teaching English in Hamheung, North Korea? Give out copies of the Declaration of Independence while teaching English in Dawei, Myanmar?
What's your solution? Sitting down and talking? How did the talking go with Myanmar's rulers - refused to allow all US, and most foreign, aid after the typhoon which killed 500,000.
How about talking with Saddam? Twelve years and still hadn't gotten anywhere - even talked for 5 years AFTER the US made regime change the official US policy. Of course, it didn't help that "pacifists" arguing for more dialogue - the UN, the French, the Germans, and the Russians - were skimming billions of dollars off their suggested "humanitarian" actions.
Speak softly and carry a big stick only works if you actually are willing to use the stick. If you're too squeamish for that, then I suggest you move over and let the grown ups actually do what needs to happen.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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As far as oil goes, the majority of Iraqi oil was controlled by BP and Shell until 1972 when Iraq nationalized oil. And then cut deals with France and Russia.
Note that BP is British Petroleum, a UK company. And Shell is Royal Dutch Shell, a Dutch company. The US had precious little stake in Iraq before 1972 or afterwards. And even the recent grants of oil rights saw US companies getting about 30% of the production leases.
The US has never been a major consumer of oil from Iraq. Nor has the US been a major consumer of oil from the Middle East; rather, most of the oil goes to Europe or Asia. The US still produces 45% of its own oil, and buys more from Canada than it does from the Middle East. We buy more from Venezuela and Mexico than we do from the Middle East.
If you want to say the war was about oil, then it was about the US ensuring a stable supply of oil for the EU, not for itself.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!