The Wide Angle: Wet Energy
March 09, 2009
The solution is so obvious: water.
Water, water everywhere. The earth's surface is seventy percent ocean. Half the world lives within fifty miles of (but not on) the oceans. More live near (but not on) lakes and rivers and streams. This represents a lot of energy laden water, located exactly next to people, that is not burdened by terra firma's messy eminent domain issues.
There's a lot of water-borne energy prototyping going on now, seeking to capitalize on the various ways water creates and releases energy: current, vortex induced vibration, offshore wind (well, wind actually happens above water, but when it does so over the flatness and openness of the ocean, wind gets bigger and thus more attractive), salinity gradient, ocean thermal, wave, tidal.
With all of this going on in the water, could we not cordon off sections of the ocean for energy production, staking out areas best suited to tap water's multiple energy offerings? Imagine an ocean farm with wind turbines and solar panels topside, and hydrokinetic and other water based solutions on and below the surface. The farm's total production curve would be much smoothed by the different things happening at different times: wind blowing, sun shining, tides and currents moving, temperatures differing. Yet the variously contributing energy sources each get to attach to the common, costly structure that anchors them in place, and they each get to ride the same expensive transmission line to the end user (making expensive oceanic structure and transmission, pro rata, less expensive).
Whereas we've been thinking about renewable solutions like solar and wind since the 1973 oil embargo, water based renewable energy solutions are just getting started (see Walt Musial's PowerPoint here). What if a big, fat, juicy solution was there beside us all along, and we're just now catching on that all along we had a big, fat, juicy solution right there beside us?
Photo: Joan Gomez on flickr
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