Slashdot Mirror
Generating Power From Ocean Buoys and Kites
cheezitmike writes "Researchers at Oregon State University are testing a new type of wave-energy converter to generate electricity from ocean waves: 'Even when the ocean seems calm, swells are moving water up and down sufficiently to generate electricity. ... For decades the challenge has been to build a device that can withstand monster waves and gale-force winds, not to mention corrosive saltwater, seaweed, floating debris and curious marine mammals. ... In the most recent prototypes, a thick coil of copper wire is inside the first component, which is anchored to the seafloor. The second component is a magnet attached to a float that moves up and down freely with the waves. As the magnet is heaved by the waves, its magnetic field moves along the stationary coil of copper wire. This motion induces a current in the wire — electricity.'"
Meanwhile, researchers at Stanford are working to design "turbine kites" that operate at 30,000 feet, where air currents flow much faster than they do close to the ground. Ken Caldeira, a Stanford associate professor, said, "If you tapped into 1% of the power in high-altitude winds, that would be enough to continuously power all civilization."
Someone got the wiring wrong. Poor fishies.
Health Freedom is almost as popular as Freedom itself.
Wouldn't this cause drag in the jetstreams... which are, you know, absolutely critical for weather - and thus life - on this planet? If we alter the jetstreams even slightly, aren't we going to cause major collateral damage down the line?
There's no such thing as free energy.
Now there's an idea!
Surely that would require no significant amount of resources to be tapped. Maybe just an area the size of Australia? Not sure about that though. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
"I like it when the red water comes out.."
Nature itself uses tech. similar to solar panels (green leaves) to get the energy it needs, not the wind or waves.
My bet is on more efficient solar panels, a solid state power collectors.
The challenge with this plan is how are they going to transmit the energy from 30,000 feet? How much does 40,000 feet of cable weigh? That's about 7 miles. Perhaps they could use lightweight tether and beam the energy using microwave like the space energy proposal but that adds complexity. BTW, The design referred to in the article uses a series of helicopter-like blades to sustain lift and generate electricity.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Here in Oregon the greenies have been fighting against the energy buoys for a while. They are concerned that electromagnetic cables on the ocean floor could affect sea life, and that buoys could interfere with whale and fish migration. We've also been tearing down hydroelectric dams because it disturbs the salmon. We got Washington DC jacking up the price of non-enviro friendly electricity on one end and the greenies on the other end kicking the green energy in the balls.
I'm interested in this topic partly because of its connection to "seasteading" or sea-surface colonization.
As with other forms of "alternative" energy, though, the problem is cost. Generating energy from renewable sources certainly sounds nifty. But does it make sense for the kind of low-budget settlement that could plausibly exist anytime soon, or even for conventional markets on land? The article summary is about making an energy generator that will work, period, not making something that can compete with existing energy sources. Right now, alt-energy proposals all seem to rely on governments heavily taxing fossil fuels and heavily subsidizing the new sources, creating a very unfree market. I've even heard the claim (though I've not looked into the numbers) that some of these systems cost more to build and maintain than the lifetime expected value of the energy they harvest.
Rather than a big, durable system, why not some kind of cheap low-energy system? I've heard of some tiny wind (?) energy generator developed for use in the Third World that costs next to nothing and produces a tiny but useful trickle of electricity. If you've got a bunch of those, it doesn't much matter if some break in a big storm.
Revive the Constitution.
Google already did this and patend it
"If you tapped into 1% of the power in high-altitude winds, that would be enough to continuously power all civilization."
And if you tapped into 1% of the power in the heat of the earth's core, that would be enough to power all of civilization on Zeti Reticuli, and if you tapped into 1% of the solar output by building a tiny Dyson sphere that would be enough to power all of Known Space. But let's first ask ourselves, is it practical and cost-effective?
At first glance I read the title as "Generating Power From Ocean Buoys and Kitties"
I thought someone had finally harnessed the power of self-righting kitties for the betterment of mankind.
Ben Franklin?
I wonder how you can get by the kites when you're flying directly at them in an airplane. They'd need to GPS coordinate where the kites are at all times. I mean really, who wants to die by a kite in mid air? Would be funny but not so pretty.
I spent a year at Oregon State University back in 2006-2007. They were talking about the ocean wave generators back then; it seems to be the darling of the engineering department there.
Don't ever go there by the way. It's in a really small town with an annoying football culture and an annoying number of frat houses, filled with small-time criminals, bored cops, and very few permanent residents.
Boondoggle: n. work of little or no value done merely to keep or look busy.
Political favor is unfortunately a far more dominant motivation to develop sustainable energy technology than sustainability itself. I've seen too many boondoggle projects get huge grants because they are the most visible, like big wind farms within sight of a large population, in favor of more suitable locations. If we can't implement a centuries-old technology effectively today at ground level, what good is a new technology in one of the most foreign environments known to mankind? Ignorant energy harvesting is what got us in this mess in the first place!
I have a strong respect for academic studies, but minds aimed at sustainable living are wasted on these implausible contrivances. There's enough dorks on Star Trek forums trying to prove useless theories. Don't waste our taxes on them.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
The simplest idea I've seen uses a kite on the end of a tether. The tether is paid out, generating energy, and then pulled back in, requiring energy. By changing the kite's angle of attack during the recovery phase, a net energy output can be obtained.
The energy output is supposed to be around 20kW per square metre... is there any reason why this wouldn't scale to 20GW for square-kilometre kites?
www.win.tue.nl/casa/meetings/special/ecmi08/pumping-kite.pdf
That is right, hot air can power steam turbines. Using 1% of the comments here could provide enough power to power the world. This one in particular would generated a LOT of power.
(Reminds me of the "Scream Floor" on Monsters Inc.)
Various ideas are tacking center thought of producing green energy here are books about producing alternative energy many guys trying to produce electricity or power for personal useâ¦.
Various ideas are tacking center thought of producing green energy here are books about producing http://www.ebooksresearch.com/alternative-fuel-and-energy-1.asp" target="_blank"> alternative energy many guys trying to produce electricity or power for personal useâ¦.
I strikes me that in both these solutions, they are using a lot of vulnerable wiring to either transmit the current somewhere it can be used or to actually generate the current. Why not stick to the same principle as hydro-electric ? If you build 2 tall chimneys, one shorter than the other, and join them at the base via a turbine, the pressure difference between the two will turn the turbine. The higher the taller chimney, the greater the pressure difference. This works with or without a jet stream type phenomenon.
Implement a similar scheme in the ocean, where either a deep underwater current or just the simple pressure difference will suck (or blow) water down from (or up to) a higher level, turning a turbine. The turbine can be onshore for easy maintenance and repair. Drop one end of a rigid pipe to the bottom of the Marianas trench and you will have a pressure difference of 1000 times sea level. I realise you wouldn't see the full 1000x pressure at sea level but by gradually reducing the diameter of the pipe as it ascends you can maintain a considerable pressure difference. With both ends under water it creates a circuit with a turbine in the loop. You could even take the top end through a desalinisation plant for an agricultural or potable water supply. The pipe won't be crushed because the pressure at depth will be equalised inside and outside the pipe. The only problem might be crap being sucked into the pipe, but I'm sure there are technical solutions for that. Ocean currents are basically giant hydraulic systems anyway.
Yes I know you still have to get the power to where it will be used, but the current situation isn't much different anyway. You already have power lines stretching hundreds of miles, you already have trans-continental oil and gas pipelines.
In addition to half-submerged loose containers, which infest navigable waters nowadays, we will have these generators, drifting around after a storm.
Damage to boats, caused by these extremely dangerous items in the oceans, will cancel environmental gains thousand times over.
These well-meaning schemes still founder on the basic problems of working in a salt-water environment and the issue of a very dilute energy source.
You can't make a generator that works directly off ocean-swells-- the swells come by so slowly you'd need a coil inductance of about ten thousand Henries.
A simple loop of wire, as postulated, has about a millionth of that.
Plus you need considerable iron to channel the magnetic flux. No way around it.
Regarding the kites, figure out what the very lightest generator weighs, per watt. Hint: not under 30 kilos per KW. Now assume you want to power 100 houses, say 50 KW.
Figure out the size of the kite needed to lift than many tons. Now at a 30 degree kitestring angle, the pull on the string will be twice the weight of the kite. Figure out how
much 60,000 feet of kite string that will take that kind of stress weighs. Now you need another large kite just to hold up the kite string.
And BTW, the "high speed" winds up there are not a panacea. They're high speed but low in density. The energy is, again, very dilute. You need to at least double the size of the kite to get the same amount of lift and pull as you can get at low altitudes.
.
I say we just keep burning old tires to heat our homes and be done with it...
I'm sick of all the bogus reasons people come up with why something isn't going to work when they have no fucking idea what the are talking about.
It's not cost effective - No shit because no one is making 50 million of them yet.
It's going to change the weather - Ahh yeah and so does standing outside on a windy day jackass.
It's going to hurt the sea life - Ahh yeah and so does all the trash we dump in the ocean every day and don't forget about all the dead zones from algae overgrowth caused by fertilizer and raw sewage.
Get some fucking prospective people.. We already are killing the planet.
Step 1 is to learn to kill it sloooower.
Step 2 is improve step on step 1.
Step 3 is to get the fuck out of here.
Step 4 ????
Step 5 Profit FOREVER.
Most large dams are there also for water storage and flood control, to even the supply out over the year, and we really don't have much in the way of alternatives for that.
I think the idea of lifting a generator on a kite is absurd, however, the Ladder mill concept, or any other scheme involving a reciprocating airfoil or flight path can be utilized by a generator on the ground to take advantage of variations on the tension of the tether to generate electricity. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2008/aug/01/electric.kite
I'm surprised this was brought up publicly because everyone knows the CIA is hell bent to make sure any carbon neutral energy source never takes hold. It's oil and war forever for us, baby.
How do get the energy from earth to Zeti Reticuli?
I like your thinking but I don't think you're being practical or cost effective.
With a 1MW trial set for next year.
mark
Ya know the old trick of putting a square of paper on a kite string so it rides up the string to the top?
(Also done more elaborately so it drops a parachute toy once it hits a trigger at the top, or carries a candle up at night, and many other variations).
I'd love to see huge "flying wing" kites tethered at 30K feet -- that'd mean tether material strong enough to handle the forces involved (or else when the string breaks it drags across Oregon from Portland to Pocatello tearing up everything in between, before the kite hits the ground somewhere in Wyoming).
Heck, it's a small step toward the space elevator.
That's why I use only fuel obtained from 100% organic crude oil, flowing the goodness of Mother Earth . I'm confident Exxon fuel comes from free-ranging, happy dinosaurs.
I wouldn't even think of filling my Prius with fuel that was from living matter trapped and enslaved on some industrial agri-business and force-fed chemical fertilizers.
http://www.makanipower.com/vision.html
Have to disagree there. Long term drought is a real possibility for several areas of the nation. My own state of Georgia got down to a pretty darn low amount of water in our dammed up reservoirs the last two years due to severe summer drought. It was nip and tuck there whether or not atlanta metro would be able to have any water at all. Luckily it finally rained, but man it got close. They've determined we really do need more reservoirs and I would have to agree with them. When you have entire cities just slap running out, no river water, low reservoirs, ground water table dropped to ridiculous low levels, etc you only have one option, build more reservoirs so in wet years you can store more, and that will mean dams, and as long as you are building dams, might as well have some hydropower with it.
You can't just tell 5 million people in a state tough luck, no water for you, buh bye! Or 35 million people in California or elsewhere. this isn't a joke anymore, it is completely serious business.. And similar is happening all over, not only in the US but all over the world.
The only way around it is better water management (try to not contaminate sources, make sure the infrastructure isn't leaky, charge a fair but reasonable price for mass water delivery, educate the populations better, etc), better conservation (variety of methods), and *more storage*. If you need water and let it all run down to the ocean without adequate storage and use first, you will just run out, and that causes a bit of social messiness it does.... You need all three avenues to be taken, just one or the other won't be enough.
Home cisterns and storage is cool too, nothing against that, I do it myself here with water barrels as a backup, but tons of people live in apartments and so on and there are industrial and agricultural uses of water that just require reservoirs, the quantities needed just cabn't be met with man made containers other than earth, rock, concrete and river valleys. We simply can't build stand alone vessels to the scale we need, in size or quantity, it would..aw heck, who knows, a few hundred gallon plastic stock tank cost a few hundred, so scale it up from there. It would cost buhzillions, some huge number, to take the place of reservoirs, it just couldn't and wouldn't be done. That leaves dams and reservoirs as the only other viable option. Mankind has struggled with this since we have been mankind, reservoirs are the option everyone has come up with.
Ya, if you area tiny nation that is rich as snot and have ocean front property you can setup some nuke powered desalinator, but we have to get real on mass scale here for mass quantities of people, we aren't desalinating the ocean to the scale we need anytime soon. So..catch rain water and slow down river water, that's it more or less.
We have three different fairly large man made ponds/reservoirs here on the farm and I am real glad we have them. The last two summers when it didn't rain my cows had *nothing* to drink except that pond water, stored up rainwater. The normal "year round" creek they drink from dried up to hard rock and sand with a few muddy patches left. It would have wiped us out without that pond, and it dropped more than ten feet! Luckily as well we had enough stored hay, because the pastures just went to brown dust mostly. This spring though has been wet and the pond has come half way back up, but still, much lower than it was some years ago now. This is all over the south, do you remember all the fgire stories from last year? It's not just outwest that has been getting nailed, the southeast has been off and on for a few years now and longer range predictions have us for less water, with a higher demand. The feds own and control most of the reservoirs here, so now the state is thinking of building their own, so they can control them themselves.
Hi all,
What about attaching underwater buoys that bob up and down and operate a pump that pushes high pressure seawater onto land. A few hundred buoys and you've got some serious water pressure that can push the turbine on land. This was developed by one of Australia's oil exploration men, who took advantage of the oil industry engineer's experience of pumping fluids in the marine environment. So instead of expensive electronics out at sea, it's just underwater buoys (that don't interfere with shipping) and pipes pumping water in to the mainland.
Apparently the cost advantages of doing it this way with only plumbing at sea and all the generators and electronics on land are significant. http://www.ceto.com.au/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CETO_Wave_Power
ABC news video illustrates bobbing / pumping action of CETO wave power buoys (no sexual puns intended)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V27ZBODcv0c
that's why I said this "The only way around it is better water management (try to not contaminate sources, make sure the infrastructure isn't leaky, charge a fair but reasonable price for mass water delivery, educate the populations better, etc), better conservation (variety of methods), and *more storage*."
I agree, water delivery, especially to big cities, is way undervalued and cheap. So are most of the other things they need to import. The US in particular has been using the rural "flyover" areas as a form of external exploited colony, that's why there are such wide diverse wage pay scales and cost of living, etc. Food, electricity, water, natgas, etc is all being sold way too cheap and the original owners, where this necessary stuff comes from, have been getting almost bupkis for it, so cheap the big cities waste it constantly and are extravagant with it.
In other words, I'll take the complaints of urbanites about our big trucks and mileage more seriously when I start to see them shut off those ludicrous advertise to the space aliens huge corporate lit up signs at night, and they get real on commuting and let a few million more people stay home to sit in front of a computer screen and work, as opposed to commuting back and forth twice a day to go sit in front of a computer screen in a totally unecessary huge corporate ego "office tower". What a freeking waste of resources and energy. Moving electrons on a data wire is loads cheaper than moving humans all the time. Along with all the wasted water and so on, Ya, golf, if it is a drought, let them play on all sand and dried dirt. When we are shutting down farmland because of lack of irrigation water, but golf courses are being watered, something is just *wrong*.
We also need a national water pipeline "grid", pipelines and deep reservoirs, to help balance out excess water in some areas to lack of water in other areas. As a nation we get enough water, we just don't yet have the means to really shift it around where it is needed better. I would have much rather seen them do something like that rather than bailout the casino bank wealth skimming "industry"