I can’t help but think that there are more ways of generating electric power than what we currently do.
What about tide wve generators? I know that the tides are hugely strong and you cannot reist their power, so why hasn’t there been power stationes built upon craggy, rocky coastal areas of earth?
How about the geothermal vents on the ocean floor, fast flowing HOT water to power turbines?
deep and not so deep ocean currents?
volcanic heat exchanger, thermocouple electricity?
antarctic 300 mph wind electricity farms? Mountain top fast wind farms?
Has anyone theoretically figured out how to handle and capture the giga watt energies of lightning?
Could lightning strikes be attracted sufficiently and used to charge mountainous battery arrays?
I just wonder if these things could be done to free us from oil dependence.
Opinions and thoughts?
There is some interest in tidal generators, but they are very costly to build and the output is not constant. Not only does it vary during the day, it varies with the phase of the moon. (Maximum at new moon and full.)
There is also some interest in geothermal power. There is a geothermal electricity plant north of San Francisco. There are problems:
– What you get out of the ground is not nice clean steam — it is a mixture of steam, water droplets, sand, gravel, hydrogen sulfide, and other contaminants that will turn your turbine into junk unless you clean it up first.
– You have to pump the condensate water back into the ground. That takes energy.
– The thermal efficiency is lousy, because the steam is at low temperature. Hence, great gobs of waste heat are released to the atmosphere.
– There are not a lot of sites around the world where geothermal energy can be obtained. The one near San Francisco is, I think, the only one in the US. Iceland has quite a lot of it; there is a lot of volcanic activity there.
Lightning: Not practical in the foreseeable future. The flashes are too short to be easily captured, even if you had a mast that lightning liked.
http://amasci.com/coilgen/ Build this ultra-simple AC electric generator from magnets, wire, and cardboard. (And a big nail!) Light a small lightbulb, or flash a red LED.
Jamie Shinkman describes a variable speed permanent magnetic generator to be used in wind turbines over a standard generator, doubly-fed induction generator. These new generators can be customized to the parameters of individual projects for better efficiency and production.
http://Magnet4Power.net -