Generating Power From Ocean Buoys and Kites 131
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."
Zap (Score:2)
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Putting the actual generating elements in seawater is a maintenance nightmare.
Images here:
http://media.smithsonianmag.com/images/The-electric-wave-model-8.jpg [smithsonianmag.com]
1% is such a small number (Score:1)
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Yes, it may power a civilization... but to what end? If it means stronger tornadoes in the midwest, it could be both tragic and expensive. The natural resources used to produce such a device would be somewhat trivial compared to usual consumption, but what impact would this have on us common folk?
Re:1% is such a small number (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, for God's sake this neurotic fingernail chewing has to stop. Any energy used to create electricity MUST, by the laws of physics, come from somewhere else. Sorry kiddies, but there is no magic wand to make energy appear without some consequences. Grow up.
By choosing to shoot down any and all alt-energy methods, you thereby choose to continue burning fossil fuels as the major method of electricity generation, which is also the majority source of carbon and old school pollution.
It's time to put on your big-boy pants, recognize we have a problem that needs solutions NOW and be willing to deal with the consequences. The second worst thing we could do, next to "nothing", is pick a single new method to pursue. We need to try them all to see what works, what the problems are, etc.. The answer will probably be a mix of new technologies.
We've become a nation, no a WORLD of spoiled whiners. Man up, take some fucking responsibility and DO something. Spoiled whining children should be spanked.
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No it isn't. You must suffer from some sort of adolescent apocalypse obsession. Wipe off the goth makeup and stop being so emo, it's annoying.
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Some lines are more efficient than others, but the technology is available to take energy all the way across the country, with the losses of maybe fifteen percent. Look up "High Voltage Direct Current [wikipedia.org]."
When you portray yourself as a pesky realist who actually understands how things work, it helps if you actually understand how things work.
Re:1% is such a small number (Score:5, Informative)
The figures for solar are using the average power, but it's worth noting that a number of the places with the highest solar energy are not particularly suited to human habitation. The Sahara desert is 9,000,000km^2. Enough solar energy hits less than 1% of the Sahara to power the entire world.
That's not to say wind power is a waste of time. The nice thing about this idea is that it works at night. Without some very efficient storage system or room-temperature superconductors, it's not feasible to power the whole world with solar energy. It's much easier to take things like this seriously, however, without the needless hyperbole.
[1] Note I'm assuming 100% efficiency here. The original article stated 1% of the energy in the wind, not 1% of the extractable energy, meaning that he was also assuming 100% efficiency. Back in the real world, scale all of the areas up by another order of magnitude or so.
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Realistically though - you would never ever want all of the world's electricity production in one location or from one method.
Obvious political reasons - see Middle East OPEC Cartel for more information on this.
Power distribution nightmares - although super conducting main lines like they're using in New York are very promising.
Night / Day transitions - At night, the desert won't be generating anything.
SimCity Microwave Power is the only answer... and a great weapon to use if someone pisses you off.
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Power distribution nightmares - although super conducting main lines like they're using in New York are very promising.
There are some risks as well. http://www.hsb.com/theLocomotive/Story/FullStory/ST-FS-SOLAR.html [hsb.com] One grid means one point of failure. Three days in Houston with no power was bad enough.
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And last but not least, where are you going to put all this power for use at night? Yeah maybe wind helps but many of the same problems crop up.
Consider that the highest demand for power is during the day to run air conditioning, and solar for supplemental power start to make sense. Just not dollars, as it is still amazingly expensive.
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And last but not least, where are you going to put all this power for use at night? Yeah maybe wind helps but many of the same problems crop up.
Consider that the highest demand for power is during the day to run air conditioning, and solar for supplemental power start to make sense. Just not dollars, as it is still amazingly expensive.
"Amazingly expensive" depends on where you live... assuming you're not trying to go off-grid, living in a desert area like Houston shouldn't be expensive. It should yield a decent ROI. In the desert in southern California, my father's system was able to pay for itself in about five years. It cost around $30,000, but the electric bill was also approximately $600/month.
Funny enough, this story also underscores your point strongly. They use almost no electricity on cloudy/rainy days and during the night.
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Nature's take (Score:2)
My bet is on more efficient solar panels, a solid state power collectors.
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*Ring ring*
Photosynthesis----->Coal------------------>
\
-->Electricity
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The problem is/solution is... (Score:2, Insightful)
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
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Pumping kite wind generator (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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How much does 40,000 feet of cable weigh?
Go to the top of the class !
This was briefly discussed in Number Watch [numberwatch.co.uk] a few years ago.
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How much does 40,000 feet of cable weigh?
Go to the top of the class !
This was briefly discussed in Number Watch [numberwatch.co.uk] a few years ago.
I looked at that site and I am unimpressed. The guy doesn't give any numbers (despite calling his site "numberwatch"), his only argument is that _he_ can't imagine it working because he can't build it with his engineering skills - without even knowing details of the plan. That is exactly the sort of useless whinging that this thread is about.
Looking at the rest of the site, it seems to be the work of an unhinged libertarian-turned-global-warming-denier who thinks he is much smarter than everybody else, obvi
Stop the Irony (Score:4, Insightful)
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Taken to the extreme, the green ideology and its precautionary principle demands suicide.
These people need to go outside and kill something. Seriously. Animals and plants die. It's a given.
But as long as we don't burn fossil fuels on a massive scale, don't emit any poisons in bigger quantities or higher concentrations than we found them, as long as we make sure that we permanently set aside 10%-30% of all land, and lakes, and sea, and ocean, as long as we do that nature will be fine. This is coming from an
Re:Stop the Irony (Score:5, Insightful)
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More that boiling the message down to a one sentence eyeball grabbing headline ends up removing all the sane details of said message...
The paradox happens when the headlines are put up against each other, with no details included...
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Dams are some of the most ecologically disruptive creations of mankind. They are not, repeat not "green" power.
You could put paddlewheels all up and down every river not being used for transport (and some of those too) and generate hydro power without having to build megalithic dams, but humans seem to be addicted to centralization. There are benefits to be had from it for sure, but [large scale] dams are still bad.
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Dams are some of the most ecologically disruptive creations of mankind. They are not, repeat not "green" power.
Personally, I don't care one way or another. As I see it, "ecologically disruptive" is overrated. Even if humanity turns out to be one of the great ecological disruptions of the past few billion years for Earth, it's for a good cause, namely a space faring technological society. We need a better reason than that to stop building them. That dam does a lot of work for us.
You could put paddlewheels all up and down every river not being used for transport (and some of those too) and generate hydro power without having to build megalithic dams, but humans seem to be addicted to centralization. There are benefits to be had from it for sure, but [large scale] dams are still bad.
Building dams is a hell of a lot cheaper and more efficient than building paddlewheels all up and down the river. For example, every time yo
Dual purpose (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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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.
At this point, it's very hard to get away from using dams, but there is no need whatsoever to build any more of them. In most places you can get a meaningful amount of water by collecting roof rainfall in a cistern. Distributed water storage is more durable than unified, anyway; further, there is no particular reason the state should be involved.
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ou 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.
That is exactly what is going to come to pass. Frankly, I can't get too choked up about the fall of Los Angeles.
Even a slight rise in ocean level will remove it from the map more or less entirely; I guess the race is on.
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Just because you almost run out of water does not mean you need to have a greater supply of it. Use less.
Well, ya (Score:2, Insightful)
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 fo
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Sounds like a very green bunch: A combination of astroturf + money.
I suspect that the energy lobby is somewhere behind these bizarre anti-sustainability movements. Maybe even convincing poor fools that they are really helping things out.
Free-ranging dinosaurs vs chemical fertilizers (Score:2)
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.
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Seasteading (Score:2)
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 wi
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Rather than a big, durable system, why not some kind of cheap low-energy system?
The problem becomes one that, thus far the economies of scale work such that the huge, big, durable system ultimately has a lower cost per kwh delivered than the small system.
I've worked the math several times. I just can't make the make work out for a tower, and I live in an area where I'd have a good chance of being able to set one up, in an area that's good for wind. Still, once you have the grid connect...
I keep coming up with it'd be better to take the money(even considering subsidies), and put it in
To Late (Score:1)
Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
"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?
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure we can cap and trade it into being practical and cost-effective. That's the power of the free market when some people are in charge.
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well, yea,
that's the point of their "free market". When only the rich can afford energy, the massive amounts or poor will demand something to be done.
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When only the rich can afford energy, the massive amounts or poor will demand something to be done.
They'll create an energy-welfare system to ensure that doesn't happen. It's worked for housing and food so far.
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lol.. Yea, it will work inside that free market..
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Practical and cost effective?
Yes.
Most of earth's problems could be solved by having plentiful, cheap, easy, nearly-free energy. Not enough food? Grow-lights and mineral plants could fix that. Not enough fresh water? Purifiers would be easy to build as-needed along the coast. Not enough diamonds? Plenty of robots to mine them for you.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Insightful)
Except the major problem: too many people.
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Except the major problem: too many people.
kill all humans.. I've been saying it for years....
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you should kick it off by leading the charge yourself
Your totally right AC.. What was I thinking all these years... I should have just become 'an Hero'. Thank you so much AC.
You can now tell all your friends that you where finally successful at trolling after so many years and years of masturbation to Furry Porn in your batman one piece outfit your mom got you. Maybe one day you will be able to get a girlfriend or maybe even a job! but probably not so you should just become 'an Hero' like me since you really have no hope of ever having a life.
Take Care, AC!
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Presumably to harvest 1% of the wind energy in the upper atmosphere, you'd need to have around 1% of the wind there pass through your turbine. (Probably more, because your turbine isn't going to harvest all the energy in the wind.)
Is it "nearly free" to have 1% of the stratosphere full of turbine kites? That's a lot of kites...
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Probably much less than 1%. The upper altitude wind energy is highly concentrated in the jet streams, so you would get most of your energy from there. The harvesting is greatly complicated by the jet streams wandering around, though.
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When we harvest electricity from the environment it cools the earth down. Then all we have to do is convert the electricity into radiation (like light or radio waves) and shoot it out into space. Or we could just build a bunch of mirrors.
Old news (Score:1, Offtopic)
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 bait (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Well, perhaps a nation of 300 million can afford to research more than one thing at a time.
Both these technologies are sound ideas for research because they both seek to use some of the highest power densities that also are widespread.
The motion of the waves typically has a higher power density than the wind that created them, which is perhaps not entirely intuitive.
Good subject (Score:1)
Why use all these wires ? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:Why use all these wires ? (Score:4, Informative)
Uh, no. You can't get any energy out of the pressure difference in the atmosphere or ocean. The pressure difference is there because the medium has already adjusted to the lowest energy state. You cant milk any more energy out of a system that is already at lowest equilibrium.
captain's opinion (Score:2)
Damage to boats, caused by these extremely dangerous items in the oceans, will cancel environmental gains thousand times over.
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So ridiculous (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
.
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I'm not an expert on electro-magnetism but I know a bit about ocean waves. The swell typically has a period in the range of 5-15 seconds depending on location and depth, taking into consideration the wave height you can easily work out that there will be a fair bit of variation/acceleration at the buoy. Also, keep in mind that the waves generally aren't regular waves but part of a seastate that consists of various components with different periods, heights and directions. Personally I don't expect much from
Fuck it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Pretty simple (Score:1)
Don't tell the CIA (Score:1, Troll)
Already moving into test offshore from Wales (Score:2)
With a 1MW trial set for next year.
mark
And it's a carnival ride too! (Score:2)
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, bef
Re:Consequences (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you suggest a source of energy that has no potential downside whatsoever? No? Then, kindly, stop whining.
I swear, this attitude has got to stop. "Oh solution X for problem Y has a (potential) downside, it's clearly unsafe, we should abandon it". Happens every single fucking time power generation comes up on slashdot. Since when did people start thinking like Pierson's Puppeteers?
If a solution to a problem (in this case power generation) offers fewer downsides than the existing solutions (fossil fuels mainly), then please, by all means, implement it. This goes for passive power collection (ground based, sea based or orbital), fusion energy, biomass energy, even fission. Worry about the consequences, but don't let those dangers blind you to the very real danger of staying the course with what we already have.
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Zero point energy has no downsides, I'm going to attach one to my flying car when the Government stops suppressing the technology.
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First off these are by no means perfect solutions themselves. They're expensive for the power generated, are subject to the whims of nature and of course, could affect surrounding nature in unforeseen ways. What happens when you cause large dead spots in the ocean or wind currents? Have any real life tests been performed?
Personally I don't like the idea of off shore power generation, I'm sure it would expand and screw up the laws for sailors and the sea. Not to mention the large zones a few miles off shore
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Just how small do you think the oceans are?
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Small enough that slowing down currents and water motion for several miles might screw with the local marine life... or alter the gulf stream... or erode the ocean shelf.. who knows the exact affects?
Aside from making it illegal to boat anywhere nearby.
Re:Consequences (Score:4, Insightful)
America needs to get its nuclear ass in gear.
You clearly have no idea what fission is so why are you here and who is paying you?
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Nonsense. Of you are looking to switch power generation because the current method will kill your grandchildren, then it's perfectly reasonable to point out that the purposed solution will kill your grand children.
There is no reason
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Nonsense. Of you are looking to switch power generation because the current method will kill your grandchildren, then it's perfectly reasonable to point out that the purposed solution will kill your grand children.
There is no reason to switch to something more expensive, complicated, or convoluted if the end result is the same even if just by another means. We are looking to get off fossil fuels because it effects the environment and has the potential of destroying a lot of life, switching to something that does the exact same thing is fucking stupid.
So what happens of the consequences are better, but some idiot who can't tell the difference is still angsting in public? Should we not switch? As I see it, that's this current thread with an anonymous troll playing the role of the idiot.
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Are they really better or just different? All to often people use egg headed accounting to justify an action without actually looking at the downsides, Take my Ebaying neighbor for instance, made tons of money selling things on Ebay until you realize he was spending more to buy the stuff then he was getting from Ebay, but all he would talk about is his "profit".
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Are they really better or just different? All to often people use egg headed accounting to justify an action without actually looking at the downsides, Take my Ebaying neighbor for instance, made tons of money selling things on Ebay until you realize he was spending more to buy the stuff then he was getting from Ebay, but all he would talk about is his "profit".
I don't see unprofitability as a problem. Someone isn't going to lose my money with a stratospheric kite. Instead, I only see the various externalities like pollution, air traffic crowding and collisions, the sort of thing that affects other people either in reality or theory. And frankly, the only real way to figure out all the problems of a new technology is to try that technology out in the real world.
No, we should discuss it and make sure it's understood about what will happen, what can happen, what is likely to happen, how that is different from what we already have and if there is any real improvement. From there, we should make the decision to use or not to use.
We can rule out the absurd consequences mentioned by the initial poster, namely, drag on the jet stream.
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Profit was just an example of someone not paying attention to the details. But yea, I can see someone
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You should be bothered. I will show a few other lunatic fantasies that weren't bothered with until after the damage was done. How about sulfur and nitrogen oxide emissions, levels of mercury in emissions, or how about Co2 which wasn't even thought of as a negetive emision some thirty years ago.
What about these examples? We found out and are sufficiently informed now, if we chose to deal rationally with activities involving these chemicals. Even now, we don't have evidence that CO2 is a sufficient negative emission to regulate its emission. It's been broadly assumed that it is so, but the evidence we currently have doesn't support that. The current state is that there is considerable evidence that CO2 content of the atmosphere contributes to global temperature, that human activities are greatly re
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Nonsense. Of you are looking to switch power generation because the current method will kill your grandchildren, then it's perfectly reasonable to point out that the purposed solution will kill your grand children.
There is no reason to switch to something more expensive, complicated, or convoluted if the end result is the same even if just by another means. We are looking to get off fossil fuels because it effects the environment and has the potential of destroying a lot of life, switching to something that does the exact same thing is fucking stupid.
I am not convinced that burning fossil fuels effects the environment. The complete combustion of hydrocarbons releases energy, water, and carbon dioxide. The amount of energy, water, and carbon dioxide released is so minute compared to that of the sun and sea life that I do not believe it is causing any thing detrimental to the environment. Water and carbon dioxide is what plants need to live, by burning fossil fuels we are essentially fertilizing the earth.
If we assume for the moment that carbon dioxide
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The complete combustion of hydrocarbons releases energy, water, and carbon dioxide. The amount of energy, water, and carbon dioxide released is so minute compared to that of the sun and sea life that I do not believe it is causing any thing detrimental to the environment.
That's just an argument from personal incredulity. You need to think about what's being added to the system, not what's already there. If the bathtub is mostly full, why should I care that the tap is dripping? It's a tiny effect compared to the size of the bath. Or, as Einstein may have said, there is no force in the universe more powerful than compound interest.
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The complete combustion of hydrocarbons releases energy, water, and carbon dioxide. The amount of energy, water, and carbon dioxide released is so minute compared to that of the sun and sea life that I do not believe it is causing any thing detrimental to the environment.
That's just an argument from personal incredulity. You need to think about what's being added to the system, not what's already there. If the bathtub is mostly full, why should I care that the tap is dripping? It's a tiny effect compared to the size of the bath. Or, as Einstein may have said, there is no force in the universe more powerful than compound interest.
If the planet's ecosystem is that delicate then we are one Mount Vesuvius or solar burp away from annihilation. The climate changes, always has. The scare used to be "global warming" but the powers that be found out that trying to carry that scare for too long would be counter productive because, wait for it... the globe is no longer warming. Now the scare is "climate change" which can be carried on in perpetuity because the climate will always change and every hurricane or snowstorm is evidence of it.
Fo
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Can you suggest a source of energy that has no potential downside whatsoever?
American Blubber (TM) - very high energy density, suitable for use in conventional power stations. They're gonna die anyway so use it or lose it. Also will result in a significant reduction in Global Stupidity (TM). Unlike Global Warming, there is no doubt that Global Stuipidity (TM) has an anthropogenic origin.
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Since when did people start thinking like Pierson's Puppeteers?
Since they became pampered, overfed first world types with a vast environmental footprint? Of the course the fact that vast areas of the planet are populated by people dying early and painfully because they don't aren't allowed to have technologies considered 'environmentally damaging' is conveniently not mentioned.
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Of the course the fact that vast areas of the planet are populated by people dying early and painfully because they live in inhospitable areas like deserts and/or war among themselves is conveniently not mentioned.
FTFY
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Re:Consequences (Score:4, Interesting)
Jet Airliners already catch free rides in the jet stream to save fuel,
and as there are thousands of planes up around the world
with likely hundreds of them doing it no problems so far
that we can detect.
Also, there are huge current underwater like the antarctic circumpolar
current that has about 140 times the flow of all the rivers on Earth.
A minor tap on it would power the southern hemisphere most likely.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem comes when you depend on one thing and increase the percentage more and more. For example, the world current depends on Coal, oil and natural gas. It is adding FAR more additional CO2 than all the natural processes such as Volcano's, space, etc. Had we added only 1% new CO2, we would not have issue
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem comes when you depend on one thing and increase the percentage more and more. For example, the world current depends on Coal, oil and natural gas. It is adding FAR more additional CO2 than all the natural processes such as Volcano's, space, etc. Had we added only 1% new CO2, we would not have issues.
You might want to check the veracity of that statement...
1% of anything is RARELY an issue, and I doubt that it will be here.
You probably also should note that CO2 is 0.0383% of the earth's atmosphere.
Re: (Score:2)
Hot air can work! (Score:2)
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.)