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Underwater Ocean Kites To Harvest Tidal Energy
eldavojohn writes "A Swedish startup has acquired funding for beginning scale model trials of underwater kites, which would be secured to a turbine to harness tidal energy for power. The company reports that the kite device allows the attached turbine to harvest energy at 10 times the speed of the actual tidal current. With a 12-meter wingspan on the kite, the company says they could harvest 500 kilowatts while it's operational. This novel new design is one of many in which a startup or university hope to turn the ocean into a renewable energy source."
short answers: No, there is. The sun. No.
Won't somebody think of the children? We owe future generations a planet fit to live on and capable of sustaining the future.
Don't worry, it is being developed by a private company. Private industries regulate themselves.
I was having difficulty visualizing this technology, from the text description. Here is a YouTube video that sheds more light. Spoiler: essentially the tethered kite does figure-8 patterns to continually move the turbine through the water.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qCDRj8TE9Y
Pretend I said something meaningful or insightful here.
well based on what i have read - as the moon/tidal effeects work the earth is slowing down and the moon is gaining potential energy related to earths gravity well by moving farther away - assume this is a colosed energy system..
assume we pull energy out of it.. the moon will come closer to earth (or reduce it's movement away) - so the total energy supply would be the potential energy of the moon in relation to earths gravity well.
PE = m x g x h
m = 7.3477 × 10^22 kg
g = 9.8 m/s2
h = 363,104,000 m (using it's Periapsis)
PE = 2.61461968 × 10^32 Joules
474 × 10^18 = AEC = whole planet annual energy consumption
PE/AEC = 551,607,527,000 years....
so the answer is .. keep current rates.. and assume we could get it all from here.. 550 billion years..
according to this #19
http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_sun.html
"In about 5 billion more years, the useable hydrogen (not all the hydrogen) will have been converted to helium, and the Sun will start burning helium, and become a red giant."
if i remember right.. if it goes red giant it will grow larger than 1 AU so it will engulf earth..
basically.. we could increase energy consumption by a factor of 100 and only then would we be toying with maybe crashing the moon into us before the sun burns us away.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'