quote:
Originally posted by Robbrian:
Scientists have told us that what we have to fear most from global warming is water, the melting of our polar ice caps, all the resulting miserable after effects and rain. All records were made to be broken, and that would include the biblical 40 days and 40 nights. The ocean and its water-energy are the best and only way to eliminate the scourge of carbon emissions.
Ocean Resource Group, with offices in Miami, and New Brunswick, puts the technologies potential on the line, stating we only need 1% of the available power from ocean currents to light up the world.
It is therefore a welcome irony: Water can save us also.
At the current juncture, the alternative energies on the table are either woefully inadequate, or worse than our current source. Ethanol takes one and half times amount of fossil fuel to produce its equal Ethanol energy, and its energy coefficient is even worse than gasoline; it takes one and half times the amount of ethanol to go the same distance as gasoline.
There is also the argument that it is immoral to use food to fuel our tanks rather than feed people. If you do your math based on the world's arable land, you will find that we would have to take all of it, have nothing left to feed people, and still, we would come up way, way short on the amount needed for our tanks by a huge percentage. Wind and sun are an unreliable source, as wind and the sun are not always in evidence. The alternative fuel suggestions that are being offered now are ruses, to placate the public's rising awareness of the warming problem.
Hydrogen fuel cells are the worst option because they have an emission of water vapor.
Scientists have discovered that as an unexpected result of global warming, the water vapor in our atmosphere is increasing, which in turn is making the problem worse. The more water in a cloud, the more heat it can hold. You do not have to be a scientist to see if you converted all cars to output water vapor, you might have a problem worse than our current one. The fossil fuel industry is desperately trying to maintain the lucrative refuel concept at the expense of true progress in eliminating global warming.
The fossil fuel companies are toying with wild ideas like burying carbon dioxide. They are spending a goodly sum commissioning geological surveys to determine if it is safe. A small lake in Africa at the equator, the most stable part of earth, demonstrated that this is pure folly. The area collects CO2 naturally from underground volcano activity. Something destabilized it, and it came up and killed everyone living around the lake.
We do not need oil, coal, or gas; we never did. Blue Energ's estimate of 200,000 megawatts of ocean power available from the lower North American continent, is far below the French study's estimate of 3307 Gwh from the Passamaquoddy and Fundy area alone. The United States and Canada have used only 2% of their fresh water capabilities. You will read in some articles that the technology for ocean power is new, or new advances have been made that now make it more feasible. Wave power is new; the geothermal use of ocean heat is newer, but none of this is true about tidal power technology. The President of the United States, George Bush, agrees. On November 1, 2006, he cut off government funding for hydropower research with the statement that it was a well-established technology, which did not need any money for research. He is right. Reinventing the turbine is like reinventing the wheel. Once you have the basics you can only add bells and whistles.
There was a small story in the Miami Herald ,in the spring of 2005, about a former oil company executive who was trialing turbines in Florida's Gulf Stream. Conveniently and quietly, without a peep, the state of Florida had passed a law extending its water boundary from three miles out to twelve miles in the Gulf Stream, thus allowing turbines to be put in the Gulf Stream under Florida's control. Another company, Vendant Power, is trialing turbines in the 9-knot East River in Manhattan. A company with Miami offices is applying to the Federal Energy Commission for permission to put not yet commercially available turbines in the waters of John Kennedy's Passamaquoddy Bay. Small town newspapers in Maine are reporting on battles for the right to put turbines in the state's tidal rivers, and Blue Energy is still puffing up their press releases. Even the Arab news channel, Al Jazeera, has done a story on tidal power, and there is an Iranian environmental group online quoting Blue Energy's comments on Kennedy's dam.
In Latin America, Brazil and Peru are thinking of tapping the rivers that run between them to negate dependence of a natural gas pipeline from Bolivia. Environmentalists are railing against it. Environmental groups are attacking this effort for the potential to cause methane gas to escape from dead vegetation for ten years after a dam floods an area. Of course, using fossil fuel has no end to emissions; dams do. May I remind you of Paul Fisher's statement about fossil fuel companies using environmental causes for their own good?
My translation: These companies are slowly pulling the ocean-power-option-rabbit out of the hat, to make it look like it is a new technology, not one that has been obstructed and buried for eight-five years. They are most probably backed by fossil fuel or traditional power groups. They know that the ocean option is a government application. They are positioning themselves to have the right to tap into the government's supply as free enterprise players; that is if, and when, the government decides that the atmosphere just might possibly be collapsing, and they can either convince fossil fuel companies to give up their ship, or be wrestled to the ground by the rest of the world.
The press is going along, printing small stories here and there, but not doing any in depth stories, on what should be jumped on as a very big story the minute they saw it. The company Ocean Resource Group, with offices in Miami, and New Brunswick, puts the technologies potential on the line, stating we only need 1% of the available power from ocean currents to light up the world.
Time magazine's comprehensive cover story on global warming, done in the spring of 2006, does not mention the huge potential of this option, just like their story, so long ago, in their sister publication Fortune, did not mention the Quoddy Dam. Some things never change, including journalism complicit with political positions.
Of course, if the government is in the clutches of fossil fuel, as Vanity Fair magazine says it is, then we will watch them fiddle while we burn.
There is a very large investment and a long payback time for tidal technology, and ocean installations will need the protection of the Navy.
Rivers and streams are possible for free enterprise, but there is another option on the horizon. There is currently being marketed a small device to power a home if the home has a stream on the property. You do not need a real stream. You can use a faux stream with a constant recycling of reusable water over turbines, which recharge the pump's battery once in motion, and the same goes for powering a car. This is a free enterprise application with tremendous potential, especially for large multifamily and office buildings. There are non-combustion engine patents for cars that have been languishing in the public domain for decades, including one that runs on water. Again, we do not need oil, coal, or gas. We never did.
After a few searches I found this amazing information that has for all intents and purposes been supresszed/ignored/marginalized by the USG and the media. It stasggers the mind to think that we have a solution in hand that could be deployed immediately to eliminate carbon dioxide emmissions and generate clean , renewable energy for pennies per kilowatt hour.
If we use just abit of immagination we could develop something along the following.
The ownership of the turbines would clearly rest with the private sector. An enormous existing distribution system would need to be augmented to replace coal fired, nuclear, and gas systems, and to accommodate new connections due to normal economic growth.
These distribution systems would be organized in a way that allows existing fossil fuel providers partnership ownership to offset part of their short and long term decline in profits. (Excessive profits at that).
Under this system their would only be normal profits for those who owned and controlled the turbine farms. Similarly, the distribution system partnerships would operate not as monopolies or oligopolies but as regulated entities eschewing the organizational structures which have led to current monopoly pricing of fossil fuels brought about by deliberate constraints on supply.
The Gorlov Turbine has proven to be the most efficient turbine to-date. What needs to be done now is to ensure that all environmental concernes can be accommodated without significantly reducing the efficiency of the turbine.
There needs to be an awakening of the environmentl community to press for not just demonstration projects but actual deployment in the waters of oceans bounding the U.S.
Already operational sites are being built in
S. Korea.
Are the we not as wise as the S. Koreans?
Robbrian speaks
Published on Thursday, May 17, 2001 in the Christian Science Monitor
There's power in here... and we don't have to drill for it.
New Turbine Can Extract Energy from Flowing Water
by Sara Steindorf and Tom Regan
Water comprises 70 percent of the earth's surface and contains enormous potential as a source of energy in the future. The Amazon River alone, which transports more water than any other, could generate enough electricity to power all the towns and villages along its shore. The same is true of other great rivers around the world. So why aren't we tapping more from water's pulse?
That's the aim of Alexander Gorlov, a professor of mechanical engineering at Northeastern University in Boston, who is trying to launch an idea that would harness the power of currents and tides. If his deceptively simple-looking prototype - a barrel-shaped 36-by-40-inch turbine - can successfully transform the awesome forces of oceans, rivers, and bays into electricity, it could radically change hydropower. And thus, it could potentially solve the world's energy problems, says the optimistic Dr. Gorlov.
TESTING A TURBINE: Alexander Gorlov’s helical turbine gets a test run in the tidal currents of Cape Cod Canal in 1997.
PHOTO COURTESY OF ALEXANDER GORLOV
Today's forms of hydropower account for much of the 7 percent of world electrical output not generated by fossil fuels. Although hydropower is a clean and unlimited source of energy, it often comes at a high price. It is currently dominated by models that require huge, expensive dams - which can displace people, flood vast areas, and wipe out fish populations that need open rivers to spawn. In fact, it was Gorlov's experience with the Aswan Dam in Egypt, which he helped design and construct, that convinced him that these large-scale projects were not the best answer to hydropower generation.
Holding back further use of hydropower has been the lack of an efficient, inexpensive, and environmentally friendly device to extract energy from water - not to mention the competitively low costs of coal and oil. But the current energy crisis - with rolling blackouts in California and rising fuel prices - might be enough to boost America's appetite for renewable energy. And, Gorlov hopes, for his turbine.
Gorlov's helical turbine is based on the so-called Darrieus turbine, developed for windmills in the 1930s. The original never proved practical. The design, with its straight airfoil blades, was efficient but unstable, tending to break easily because of extreme vibrations. When Gorlov tested it in flowing water, however, he found it worked better than any other turbine, although it still had vibration problems.
After laboratory testing, he found that twisting the blades into the shape of a helix, like a molecule of DNA, would solve the problem. In flowing water, the Gorlov turbine captures 35 percent of the water's energy, compared with 23 percent for a straight Darrieus turbine and 20 percent for a conventional turbine.
That may not seem like a huge improvement, but "in this business it's a lot, because [the turbines] operate all the time, and after a while, the advantages really build up," says Jim Sysko, resident engineer at Gould Academy, and owner of Small Hydro East, in Bethel, Maine. And unlike other turbines, Gorlov's device works well regardless of the direction of water flow, making it practical in tidal flows as well as rivers.
In a tidal pool in Vinalhaven, Maine, Mr. Sysko is currently testing Gorlov's turbine which is expected to pump 5 kilowatts of energy into the Maine grid starting this fall. That's not much, but it will be enough to power the 14-bedroom motel directly above it. If the prototype proves successful, Sysko plans to install more turbines along the Maine coast.
Another test installation is now in operation in a remote area of the Amazon River in Brazil. There, local residents, who are far from the nearest power lines, use the turbines to recharge dozens of car batteries to run their television sets.
Gorlov also envisions huge underwater "power farms" that could create electricity from hundreds or even thousands of the devices linked to each other in a grid, which is anchored under water.
In full production, the cost of an installed open-river hydropower system of his turbines, Gorlov says, should be $400 to $600 per kilowatt - less than the cost of constructing other power-generation systems. And that's before operating costs of fossil-fuel plants are taken into account.
But Gorlov's turbines have other advantages, proponents say: When they generate electricity, you can't see them, you can't hear them, and they're virtually disruption-free.
"A Gorlov turbine could be airlifted into a remote community which is located near a river," says Peter Roudebush, a multi-system consultant in Boston. "If you put the turbine in the river, it gives the community the chance to generate enough power to meet many of its current needs, as well as generate more power to increase income."
GORLOV: The engineering professor’s invention is clean and quiet, he says.
JOHN NORDELL - CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR STAFF
"Because this is a product that will be used in remote locations, it's extremely important that it ... be reliable," says Ed Kurth of Texas-based GCK Technology, a renewable-energy firm that secured worldwide rights to the patents from Northeastern University in February. "The design we'll have for mass production will be aluminum. And we plan to have a design that can be put together with common tools, so you can install it in remote locations."
But Joseph Ignazio, president of Helical Turbine of Massachusetts, in Cambridge, who was the first to officially test Gorlov's turbine, in 1996 in the Cape Cod Canal, foresees several challenges.
The first is storage. While the turbine can be hooked up to an electric grid, the energy that doesn't get immediately used is wasted. And unlike a gallon of gasoline, for example, there's no way to harness the energy for later use.
Adding to this storage problem is the way nature itself works. This issue was raised by Livingston Taylor, a visiting fellow at Harvard University, during a recent conference at Northeastern about the Gorlov turbine.
"Right now the Mississippi River is running very strong," Mr. Taylor told the conference. "But how many people here have seen it in September, when ... the current has slowed to almost nothing. What happens in that situation to something like the Gorlov turbine?"
Gorlov's long-term solution is to use the turbines to break down seawater into hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis, storing hydrogen in pressurized vessels offshore. The stored hydrogen could then run through a generator to make electricity - just as a gasoline or diesel generator would.
While the technology for producing hydrogen through electrolysis exists, it is far from a system that could produce hydrogen on a large scale.
"I think it's a fantastic idea," says Sysko. "But even if there was a crash program, it would probably take us at least 10 years to get there."
Mr. Roudebush says the storage problem can be easily solved, however, if one looks at what he considers the real problem of the energy crisis: the way the electric grid works.
"Right now, the big thing about energy is there's a difference between what is generated in one place and what is demanded in another, and the grid is what transfers that energy," he says. "When a power-generating plant makes too much energy for the demand, a whole lot of it leaks out in terms of heat in transformers and all kinds of things. When there's too great a demand, people get brownouts.
"There's no reason why the grid can't be provided with these decentralized generators, like the one Jim Sysko is using in Maine. There could be millions of them powering the system, reducing the demand for more natural gas and fossil fuels, which is the whole issue," he says.
Another problem, Mr. Ignazio says, is funding. Renewable-energy development has always played second fiddle to oil, coal, and nuclear energy. And last month, President Bush proposed cutting the national budget for renewable-energy research by a third.
"We need federal subsidization," says Ignazio. "With the airplane industry, if it weren't for the federal subsidies, we'd never be able to fly like we fly today."
Yet despite problems like storage and funding, interest in Gorlov's invention continues to grow. The South Korean government recently asked Gorlov to design an arrangement of turbines for the narrow Uldolmok channel that separates the peninsula from an island. Gorlov came up with a system that could produce more than 80 megawatts - enough to power 80,000 houses - without disrupting the channel's extensive shipping. Representatives of the government met with Gorlov last month to review the plans, which they expect to include in next year's national budget. "A big plus to the turbine is that it doesn't need a dam," Ignazio says.
"There are 55,000 sluiceways [artificial channels into which water is let by a sluice] in the US where these turbines could be put to use now," says Roudebush. "Remember, we've got this concentrated version of energy that just flows by us every day. Nature doesn't waste anything."
Copyright 2001 The Christian Science Monitor
In the absence of freedom there is no active creativity, in the absence of creativity there is no progress.
In the absence of freedom there is no active creativity, in the absence of creativity there is no progress.
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