Underwater Kites Could Harvest 64 Times More Power Than Undersea Turbines [View all]

[GliderGuider]

Underwater Kites Could Harvest 64 Times More Power Than Undersea Turbines

How can we generate more power from renewable sources without using massive plots of land for solar and wind farms? Go fly a kite. According to David Olinger, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), tethered underwater kites could be used to generate large amounts of electricity by harnessing the power of ocean waves and currents. Olinger recently received a three-year, $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop this technology, and work is scheduled to begin in January.

According to Olinger, deep see currents are rife with unharvested kinetic energy. Even though we can’t see them, these currents are latent energy sources that could be tapped by the kites Olinger wants to develop.

“Unseen under the waves, winding along coastlines and streaming through underwater channels, there are countless ocean currents and tidal flows that bristle with kinetic energy,” Olinger said in a WPI press release. “And just as wind turbines can convert moving air into electricity, there is the potential to transform these virtually untapped liquid ‘breezes’ into vast amounts of power. For example, it has been estimated that the potential power from the Florida Current, which flows from the Gulf of Mexico into the Atlantic Ocean, is 20 gigawatts—equivalent to about 10 nuclear power plants.”

Which would your rather have stationed around the coastline – a bunch of unseen, virtually harmless underwater kits, or a cluster of nuclear power plants? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Here's a thought. Maybe the world's industrialized nations should pass legislation decreeing that for every new power plant constructed in a country, an existing plant of the same output must be decommissioned. No decommissioning, no new plant. It caps the nation's power output and over time cleans up its emissions.

Of course it would limit economic growth to whatever can be achieved through efficiency gains. But since we have been assured that GDP is now decoupled from energy use, that should present no problem at all.