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US Uncorks $16M For 17 Projects To Capture Wave Energy
coondoggie writes "The US Energy Department this week said it would spend $16 million for seventeen projects to help research and develop energy generating systems from waves, tides and currents. The energy agency says the US could generate up to 1,400 terawatt hours of potential power per year. One terawatt-hour of electricity is enough to power 85,000 homes, according to the agency."
Doesn't seem like a lot of money for tidal power. Scotland is already way ahead and invests more than that.
Still, better than nothing.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
With $16M spread across 17 projects, it's no wonder that STEM jobs are underpaid. Then again, with all the billions being wasted on spying (on US citizens as well as foreigners), it no wonder there is so little left for projects which might actually benefit mankind.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
So what has fracking got to do with tidal power?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Wave power has been talked up for years. No project is beyond the prototype stage, even the one in Scotland, and none of them are profitable. It's just not a very good idea.
Anything with moving parts at the ocean surface is going to be a maintenance headache. "Remember that the free surface is neither ocean nor air and that man cannot walk upon it nor will equipments remain stable in its presence. So design your equipments that they tarry not long and that they need neither servicing nor repair at this unseemly interface." - MIT/U.S. Navy ocean engineering expert. Most wave power schemes involve many big mechanical devices at the ocean surface. Fully submerged equipment or windmills above the ocean work better.
Tidal power is only feasible at a few locations worldwide. I read a study once that found ten potential sites in the world. The ideal site for maximum power output is the Bay of Fundy, but it's a long way from potential loads. Also, the way to get the most power out is to build a dam and hydroelectric plant, which totally changes the ecology in the area.
Get all the money you want, but it's regulatory compliance that's the problem, not the money - at least if this company's experience is any guide.
"Last September, with great fanfare, Ocean Power Technologies began construction on America's first wave-powered utility. Holding the first - and only - wave energy permit from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, OPT had planned to deploy a test buoy off the coast of Reedsport by spring.
But a year after the permit, regulatory and technical difficulties have all but halted the project. Federal regulators notified the company earlier this year it had violated the license after failing to file a variety of plans and assessments."
http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2013/08/oregon_wave_energy_stalls_off.html
One government hand giveth, other hands taketh away.
Only 60,000 times smaller than amount spent on military. I wonder if the US citizens will ever revolt?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
But think of the profits we can make from harvesting all of the green cheese!
I'm betting "big dairy" will never let this scenario happen.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Maybe he meant Fraking?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
But that would probably take many decades or even centuries. It may affect our grandchildren or great grandchildren but not us, so it sounds like a good plan for our immediate energy needs.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Except that increasing tidal drag would actually cause the Moon to move away more quickly. Remember, the Earth rotates faster than the Moon orbits around it.
But yeah, other than being exactly wrong, you're exactly right.
Is it really asking so much for a three-sentence summary to address "power" and "energy" correctly and consistently?
Any time someone talks about a power facility in terms of "terawatt-hours per year", they're either confused themselves, or they're trying to confuse you. (Or both.) If they're talking about "terawatt-hours of power", they're the ones who are confused.
Is it just me, or is "watt-hours per year" an unnecessarily complicated unit of measurement? I know it's commonplace, but there are just too many time units going back and forth. A watt is a joule per second, so a watt-hour per year is a (joule per second)-hour per year.
A watt-hour is 3600 joules, and 1400 terawatt-hours per year (aka 1.4 petawatt-hours per year) comes out to be just under 160 billion joules per second, aka 160 gigawatts. It seems like the unit (gigawatts) is already there, so why invent a new one? (Seems a bit like a case of Imperial vs metric units, but in this case they're both metric. The only conversion factor is different units of time.)
That means almost 12 KW per home.
I wonder if the US Energy Department is aware of the fact that in most of Europe each home gets between 3 and 5 KW. Even at 6 KW (which should be more than enough for the vast majority of homes), that would double the figure, up to 170,000 homes.
Cutting energy use should be targeted, along with new, renewable energy sources...
Doesn't seem like it would have too many moving parts or require elaborate engineering.
That's probably because you've spent a grand total of about two minutes coming up with your idea. The solution to the tidal energy problem is not going to come from a Slashdot AC, sorry.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Of course not, the government has a huge fucking military!
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
It's hard to imagine a revolution where people are dying in the streets over wave energy.
I'm sure syfy could make a weekly (or should that be weakly?) movie about it.
Yup.
NOBODY wants to talk about this one.
Extract all the energy from the wave, and you have no more wave. There is a HUGE amount of shoreline and shallow-water marine ecology that is critically dependent on wave action. Remove the waves, and you wreck that ecology.
The Environmental Impact Statements for those wave energy plants are gonna be INTERESTING.
We need money in various areas, but 2 biggies that are being missed are geo-thermal along with thorium fission. I would love to see us allocate 1B for each.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I think the media should start converting these piddling amounts of money spent on non-military projects to a new unit called the Warbuck. In this case, the project is funded at 0.0000167 Warbucks.
Actually I don't see how the Moon can move away. That would require the Moon acquiring energy in the process,
Um, the moon is moving away from the Earth, at a rate of 3.8cm per year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_distance_(astronomy)
Reason why: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12311119
PS: The Earth's rotation is also slowing down...(!)
No sig today...
Look. We should be doing whatever we can to slow the earth down. There aren't enough hours in the day at the moment! By the time I get home, cook dinner and wash up, that's it. The day's gone. Off to bed. I think about a 28 hour day would be nice. My greatest fear about wave power is that it will actually speed up earth rotation because less tidal energy is used up eroding land.
This message brought to you the Committee to Elect Ron Paul in 2016, though if cornered, he'll disclaim he had anything to do with it, and insist he just started the organization, and really just let anybody at all make statements on his behalf.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A watt is a measurement of rate of flow.
A watt-hour is a volume of energy, based rate of flow for a give period of time. 3.6 petawatt-seconds is the same amount of energy as 1 terawatt hour.
When referring to how many homes you can power, leave the hour part off. Its 1 terawatt of flow can power 85k homes. If you power them for 1 hour, than its 1 terawatt-hour, but if you do it for two hours, than it takes 2 terawatt-hours to do it.
Example, 1 gigawatt-hour can power those same 85k homes as well ... but not for a full hour, only a few seconds. Roughly 3.6 seconds to be exact.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Why say 1400 terawatts, then explain that 1 terawatt is sufficient to power 85,000 homes when you could just as easily say that it generates "1400 terawatts, enough to power 119,000,000 homes"?
The moon is moving away. I doubt we could extract enough energy to compensate.
And so on and so forth...
But can it be patented since it is essentially a perpetual motion device that every patent office official knows is impossible?
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
We spend almost 4 orders of magnitude more on subsidizing the digging of stuff out of the earth, so we can burn it. On subsidizing the most profitable corporations in the history of mankind. Hurray us.
Why not just capture the thermal energy and methane gas from the steaming heaps of horse manure radiating from Washington D.C.?
I think I hit pretty damned close to the mark by the looks of it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I just calculated (honestly) that a wall strong enough to hold back a serious ammount of water is going to need lots of energy to put up.
1TWh is a unit of energy, not a unit of power. One TWh or electricity is about enough to power 85000 homes FOR A YEAR. That's a completely fucked up way to state things.
1400 TWh per year equals 159.8 GW. US annual electricity production is about 4000 TWh/year.
average home power consumption is about (http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3) 11280 kWh/year,
so 1400TWh/year divided by 11280 kWh/year/home equals about 124 million homes.
That is the relevant figure, if you believe it. Personally, I think capturing that amount of wave energy sounds far fetched. One thing's for sure. You're not going to get that amount of power for $16 Million.
So what happens to the environment when we extract all that energy?
Nuclear plants can be used in a load following mode, but given that they have about the lowest marginal cost per kwh produced*, it makes no sense for them to NOT produce power when they can. Coal is more expensive, but if you really want to you can reach 90% capacity factor with it as well; my base has a coal powered cogeneration plant(electricity + steam heat) that can run all winter long, but in the summer it runs at less than half power, allowing lots of maintenance, but it never really fully shuts off.
The main point about capacity factor for renewable energy is that, for the most part it's not optional. So when you look at nuclear at $3 a watt vs $2 a watt solar, the nuclear is actually cheaper because you can anticipate running it at 90%, vs less than 30% for solar. So solar has to be below $1 a watt for nameplate capacity in order to actually produce the same average amount of power as a nuclear plant.
*Solar technically has a free marginal cost but you don't have a choice on when it generates power, Wind has a measurable cost per kwh because it has physical components that wear out.
I don't read AC A human right
It's not perpetual.
Wave energy stems from wind energy which stems from uneven heating of the earth by solar radiation as it rotates. It'll last as long as the sun does. No sun, no wind, no waves.
It actually won't last that long, as the sun will boil the oceans away some time before it burns out.
For all intents and purposes, in other words, perpetual.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
"One terawatt-hour of electricity is enough to power 85,000 homes, according to the agency." Izzatso? Just HOW LONG will it power those homes for? An hour? A year? Five minutes? Will somebody please explain to every reporter on energy the difference between a watt and a watt-hour? Misuse of these terms will result in your press pass being revoked.
It actually won't last that long, as the sun will boil the oceans away some time before it burns out.
So, 1 billion years (give or take) is not that long?
Wow this is the first time I talk to an immortal being! Care to share some stories from the formation of our galaxy?
This is a UDP joke, I don't care if you get it or not...
If you claim your power source is truly perpetual, you get laughed at by scientists - for such a device to work would require throwing out some laws of science which have so far withstood every effort to violate them, and a lot of effort has been made.
If you claim your power source is merely of very long by human standards but still finite duration, then you can be taken seriously.
This is presumably for research papers they can wave about to say they are looking into green technology.
16$ Million isn't a lot of money to do anything real with. I used to live close to one of the handful of Tidal (Barrage) generating stations in Nova Scotia, Canada. It was built in the 80's for likely a very exorbitant to build (likely overruns etc... who knows how much it cost), and only generates 20MW.
To put that in perspective, that is like 7 Windmills.
The good: Well unless someone blows up the moon or the oceans disappear (in either case likely electricity is the least of your worries) you have sustainable constant power.
The bad: Like most hydro electric ventures, you are pretty much limited to a few places you can put them. Once you run out, you run out. This goes for both stream and Barrage generation.
There is also that freaky generation that uses floats and wave movement, but I don't think this has ever been done in any meaningful way. To my mind, even should it work, it would A) not generate a lot of power, and B) maintenance would be a real bitch. Might be interesting from an engineering standpoint however.
It's called "dissipation as heat".