From the front page.


http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026836.000-plumbing-the-oceans-could-bring-limitless-clean-energy.html?full=true

Maybe it will work and maybe it won't. This looks like it's the resumption of trials that were started back in the late 70s, but were canned due to finance being pulled because of low oil prices. With a bit more foresight they could have figured out if this was a viable technology or a dead end 20+ years ago.

"Massive Fiberglass Tubes". Clean? Not really.

And it's not unlimited. It's precisely as "unlimited" as solar panels are. An amount of time, energy and raw materials go into the system and an amount of electricity comes out. Just as this society could churn away making solar panels until doomsday and therefore have "Unlimited Energy" so could we churn away until doomsday making this geothermal thing.

Luckily it won't work.

Why the fook not?

It just won't work dammit!

It was already demonstrated to work in the 50-120 kilowatt range, but it looks like they are running into problems trying to scale it up into the MW range. I hope they can overcome the problems.

I did like the spinoff technology used in the Toronto air conditioning system though. Saving 60 MW of electricity in air conditioning costs is better than building a new 60 MW power plant. I would like to see this technology expanded. It would only be practical for cities near a lake or coast, but that is still a lot of megawatts saved.

When you can build hundreds to thousands of gigawatts capacity with nuclear power plants, who cares about this nonsense?

Many of those looking to build these live on islands with more modest power needs. They might not need thousands of gigawatts of power. It may not make economic sense to build a nuclear power plant on every inhabited island. And it would certainly help to get these islands off of the dirty diesel generators they currently use.

Unlimited clean energy is half of the game. Show me unlimited clean resources.

The cooler and the warmer regions of ocean, AFAIK, are relatively disconnected. They suggest to mix up their nutritions and temperature wildly, with completely unforeseeable consequences for the maritimal life. Keep in mind that some wheels need turning too; turning needs oiling, so they have to oil stuff deep down. Completely doable, but if nuclear advocates would dare to form a proposition with such environmental effects, they'd be torched by the same crowd who celebrates this kind of proposition if it is "renewable".

Does not mean I'm against it per se, just cautious about their claims of being "clean" from start. (And to be honest LM seems to have run out of good ideas to research in the last years..)

Water, wind and solar?

I would hardly call clean, fresh water unlimited.

With unlimited wind/solar/wave, etc you could via desalination.


Get your damn hands off me you dirty stinking hippy!

You misunderstood what is happening here. They are not sucking up warm ocean water and spewing it out in the cold ocean regions, or vice versa. The fluid in the pipes is not even ocean water. It's ammonia, or a mixture of ammonia and water. The ammonia never leaves the pipes and is there only for thermal transfer.