Tidal Turbines in Admiralty Inlet.
IMHO, tidal power is one of the few reliable sources of non-fossil fuel power. The sun doesn’t always shine, the winds don’t always blow, but the tide always rises & falls.
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Once again, we didn’t invent it. The French have used tidal power hydro in the little coves around the Bay of Biscay (20-foot tides are common there) since the 1950s. They did it a bit differently: to get ALL the hydro power available, they dammed up some small coves, and the impounded water then runs through a turbine, first incoming to fill the basin, then outward as the tide drops outside the basin. They get useful power for a greater portion of the tides that way.
If you use tide-prediction software like Tide and Currents, you will see that doing a sea-floor model gives less period during the tide when the turbine will turn (I seem to recall that you need 3 knots). But, you don’t have to build any jetties or dams or worry about fish, either.
The French are very pragmatic. When they decide on an engineering objective, they just do it, and damn the consequences.
BTW, there’s a landlocked version of the French system called “pumped storage”, where a reservoir is built up on a hill, and the turbine put at the bottom of the hill, and the two connected by a long penstock.
When power is in surplus, the turbine works as a pump, and shoves water up the penstock into the reservoir, and when there is a need for power, the process is reversed.
They do that in at least TX and MA as I’m personally aware of, maybe other places, too.
Yeah, this is a great idea (*rolls eyes*)
Ever hear of the laws of thermodynamics? Eh? You sap energy from the tide, it has to be replaced with more energy from the moon. And before you know it…. WE’VE LOST THE MOON!
Now, stop moving. You’re stealing angular velocity from the Earth’s spin!
Yah, the environmental impact statement should be fun. Oh, and how about all the wind turbines? Are they changing the WIND FLOW? Not like that would have any ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT, would it?
“But, you don’t have to … worry about fish, either.”
Getting sucked through a turbine wouldn’t harm fish?
Remember, all you have to do is ‘raise concerns’ that maybe, perhaps one species of single-celled life form might possibly be inconvenienced in some way and you can call a halt to the whole endeavor.
Now if only we could put a bunch of them in the strait of Juan de Fuca, and power most/all? of the west coast!
Rivrdog – Now if only the French could apply that determination to clean power generation (they also have tons of nuclear plants, greenies be damned) to warfighting, they might be a useful ally.
I’ve heard of hydro-batteries. It’s not the most efficient way to store power, but it has a lot more capacity than any efficient battery we could use, including molten salts.
Robb – 😛
Although I have heard of people seriously (not you FiftyCal) concerned about wind power & how it is sapping energy from the Earth’s rotation, or weather, or some such hooey. People have a hard time appreciating scale (as in, the earth is really damn massive, as is the moon, and it would take use 100’s of thousands of years of wind or tidal power before we could even touch the motions of the two.
Guy – Tidal turbines are SLOOOW. The don’t spin very fast at all, but have massive amounts of torque. A simple stepping transmission gets the speed up to what a generator needs (kind of the reverse of the drive systems of a Navy Cruiser).