this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
41 points (93.6% liked)
Technology
59200 readers
2519 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This always makes me wonder... the tide has to be one of the biggest sources of free kinetic energy, cycled daily. I can picture a hundred different ways to tap it for free energy. Why aren't we doing it?
Salt water is a bitch. It will corrode though everything, especially moving parts. It's not that we couldn't do it, but the maintenance cost makes it unattractive.
You basically need a few conditions to be met to make this useable: tide needs to be high enough, there needs to be suitable geological formation that enables building of such power plants, it has to be publicly acceptable to build there, and you need to connect it to the grid. The last two can especially cancel eachother out.
However, this assumes you use potential energy. What you are envisioning might be more like current power (so kinetic energy) where I'm not sure what the limitations are. Perhaps it's not too practical to build huge plants underwater in locations with relatively contestant current and connect them to the grid
It isn't "free," in the sense that the energy is part of regular climate cycles. Wind farms, for example, will disrupt downstream climate patterns if deployed at large scale and in concentrated areas.
It isn't "free," in the sense that the energy is part of regular climate cycles. Wind farms, for example, will disrupt downstream climate patterns if deployed at large scale and in concentrated areas.