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The World's First Osmotic Power Plant
ElectricSteve writes "Her Royal Highness Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway officially opened the world's first osmotic power plant prototype on November 24. The prototype has a limited production capacity and will be used primarily for testing and data validation, leading to the construction of a commercial power plant in a few years time. Statkraft claims that the technology has the global potential to generate clean, renewable energy equivalent to China's total electricity consumption in 2002 or half of the EU's total power production" What's osmotic power? Wikipedia to the rescue!
Like to get excited about this, but there are some unanswered questions.
1) how much energy will be required to clean, maintain, and replace osmotic filters (these are largely built, maintained and replaced, using existing energy sources) (need to subtract this off of output. Notice no figures provided in article.
2) article says generated enough energy to boil water in a pot for the party (article doesn't explain just how much energy was utilized just getting people to and from the grand opening). Venture a guess that it was vastly larger than that required
to boil the water in the pot. Subtract off the cost of all the other activities associated with this (keeping employees fed, warm, lights on, energy for tanks plumbing, etc and it would appear that the entire venture so far is net energy negative, so question arises how long until energy positive. Simply extrapolating the amount of water mixing from all the world's rivers is hardly equivalenet to saying that all that energy is harnessed.
3) although mixing does occur naturally, as one scales the output water must ultimately eenter environment, how will biologic hazzards due to altering natural salinity gradients be mitigated. Probably more of a problem for fishes and invertebrates is the volume of water diverted and the risk due to entrapment, particularly for larval stages (intakes may need to be shut down periodically to reduce risk).
Often new energy technologies are clever ways to get taxpayers to part with their money. We need to provide more incentives for clean energy technologies, we must insist that subsidies diminish rapidly and that ALL COSTS are taken into the equation so that only the truly workable merit much assistance.
As for those who don't seem to think the natural environment is worth saving, try living without it. Love mother earth or leave it needs to be the rallying cry for the truly moral among us. If you don't like the ecosystem here, move to outer space.