January 20, 2011 • 28 mins
Oceans cover more than 70 percent of Earth's surface. But could the kinetic power of the tides or the oceans' thermal energy become the world's future power source? Listen in as Josh and Chuck break it down.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from House Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chucker's Bryant
that makes this stuff you should know? And the heavy
(00:22):
index finger of Matt Frederick. Yeah did you hear that?
Oh yeah, it was like an ant boat coming down
on something. Nobody push his record, Like Maddie, one of
my friends has um finger tips, just the fingertips that
look very much like big toes all across and um,
they're big. He has big, huge fingertips. Is is what
(00:43):
you like? The finger is just narrow and then it
balloons up at the end really freakishly. So he'd be
a good bass player, I would think, maybe, So I'll
ask him you should do that, Chuck. Do you remember
we have talked about capturing enter g right, because energy
can neither be created nor destroyed, It can only be captured.
(01:05):
We talked about several ways to do this. Yes, well,
one of the ways we talked about, um was by
putting basically what amount to wind turbines underwater, and there
was a we did under water turbines. Yeah, sure we did, right,
I think so it's hard to tell these days. Well,
if we didn't, that's good because we're going to cover
that again in this podcast. I think we did because
(01:27):
we talked about Verdant technology and they were the ones
who put some in the Hudson, didn't we East River? Yes? Sure? Okay, so,
um they put some into two thousand and six. It was,
you know, to to wide acclaim. This is a huge project.
They were gonna just power large parts of New York
with this technology. And they went back to check on
(01:47):
them and they found that, um, all but two of
their wind turbines were just completely in shambles. It's one
of the great challenges in underwater energy production BINGO. I
have updates on them. We'll get to that later though. Okay,
(02:08):
luckily for us, right, because the the ocean and well
bodies of water are this huge untapped resource, well mostly
untapped resource of energy, there are other ways to capture
energy from the ocean, right, which is what we're going
to talk about today. Let's do it, and let's start
with the French, because apparently they've long known they're all
(02:28):
over it. Yeah, we like all of the major innovations
that we're pursuing right now came from the French over
the last couple of centuries, right who knew, Well, we
should just mention the history in in uh long time ago,
a frenchy and his son who I could not find
their names. I couldn't either, but they had a pretty
(02:49):
cool idea. They attached a big lever to the side
of their boat, and when the ocean moved up and down,
the lever moved up and down, which could potentially power
pumps and saws and things like that. Right, and let's
cat showing the mechanical energy of wave motion. Very good sense.
But unfortunately, well or maybe fortunately, the steam engine came
along kind of rendered that. Unfortunately for him, his idea
(03:11):
was rendered moot. But thanks to the rest of us,
because steam energy turned out to be a pretty cool
thing the steam engine did. About a hundred years after that,
another Frenchman used heat energy from the ocean to generate power,
but it was not very cost effective, so that died
as well. And then uh nineteen sixty six there was
(03:32):
finally some success once again in France. In Britain, Yeah,
and the on the Ross River and uh, it still
operates today, and it is actually, from what I can tell,
that the biggest success, right, that's yeah, and it's because
it's actually generating electricity quite a bit, two D forty megawatts,
which is uh about that's better than a wind farm
(03:54):
and that's yeah that typical. Not quite as good as
a coal fire power plant, but um it is better
than a typic coal wind farm, and um it is
far and away I think the most successful UH Ocean
Energy UM outfit running right now. Right. Yeah, well that's
on the river though, was it. Yeah, So it's capturing
(04:14):
the energy of the tide. There's also you can you
can capture the energy of the heat differential, right, and
you can capture the mechanical energy right with ways. There's
three ways, three at least, yeah, yeah, exactly right, because
there's also the currents underwater turbines. It's four, I mean,
(04:34):
the ways to capture energy. Right, let's talk about ways.
This one is my favorite because there's so much to it. Right,
there's mechanical energy that can be captured, kinetic energy that
can be converted into useful mechanical energy. Basically, what you
do is you want to power somehow power turbine or
(04:55):
a piston to create electric city from a generator. Right. Yeah,
and waves move thanks to the wind, create big crest
and troughs. And at one point someone looked at those
and said, hey, that's pretty consistent. I bet we could
capture that. Um. It is very consistent, is very predictable, right, Um.
(05:17):
Waves are found all over the place, so they actually
can bring energy from other parts of the globe to you,
to you, top of the muffin, to you. Uh and um,
let's talk about how a wave comes up. Did you
read this? No, because you're the expert. You're the wave expert.
All right. So waves are the result of a transfer
(05:38):
of solar energy to the water, to the ocean. Okay,
so did you know that wind is really just a
creation of solar energy, solar radiation, solar heat, and that
ends up driving the wave. Yes, But it's interesting how
it starts with the sun. It does. It does start
with the sun, Chuck, thanks for that segue. Um, this
(06:00):
sun does not heat the earth evenly, right, right, So
there's different pockets of air, surface air that are heated
more quickly than others. They rise, okay, and as they rise,
the colder air rushes in and the movement of the
colder air to fill in the space left by the
warmer air. That's wind. That's wind. That's awesome. Okay. So
(06:24):
when this, when this water, when the ocean is pushed
by wind enough, long enough, hard enough, fast enough for
far enough distances, waves pick up, right, And that that
gives even more traction to the wind. So the waves
just get bigger and bigger. That's why a good storm
will produce bigger waves. Right. But what you have is
(06:45):
kinetic energy pushing the water into waves, and that kinetic
energy becomes stored in the wave. Right. So the wave
isn't a bunch of moving water. The water actually, as
this kinetic energy rolls over, it acts as a conveyor belt,
so it moves in a scular motion and delivers this
big dent amount of kinetic energy to you to capture
(07:07):
if you have a wave converter. Uh, handy, exactly, dude,
Very nice explanation, was it? Yeah? Thanks man? I think so.
It's been a little while since I got one. Right.
Shall we talk about tides now? Yes, much to the
chagrin of Bill O'Reilly, we do know what causes tide.
I'm glad you meant did you see that? Bill O'Reilly
didn't know that the pull of the moon, the gravitational
(07:30):
force of the moon, is what creates tides. What's crazy
is that the atheist was like, well, we don't know,
but still he was a little flustered. I can he
was flustered, but a real opportunity to be like everybody
that saw that was on the edge of their seats saying,
say it the moon, and the guy was like, yeah, well. Unfortunately,
no steps in there to correct him. I haven't heard
(07:51):
a response from him either. I'm curious who Bill O'Reilly. Yeah,
I don't think he's going to come out and address it.
At this point, he already looked dumb enough. He didn't care. Okay,
so uh, for those of you don't know what you're
talking about quickly. Bill O'Reilly was interviewing the head of
the Atheists of America and said, he explains God by
the fact that no one can explain what causes tides.
(08:12):
The tides go out, tides come in every day, and
we can't explain it, and no one knows why. I
think is what he said. So anyway, it is in
fact caused by the gravitational pull of the moon. Mr
O'Reilly and Uh. The cool thing about tides is there
everywhere along the coast. They all coastal areas experienced too
high tides and two low tides every day and they're
(08:34):
pretty much on the button. The unfortunate thing is there's
only about forty places around the Earth where you can
generate electricity from this because the difference between high and
low tide has to be at least sixteen feet and
that doesn't happen everywhere. So there's like forty sites around
the world that are suitable. Forty sites and the Bay
of Fundy I don't think we mentioned yet that is
where they're actually doing this, and it's it's a great place. Yeah,
(08:57):
it's um a narrow inlet and has the highest tides
in the world fifty feet in a very short cycle,
so in six hours they can produce a hundred and
ten billion tons of seawater flow in and out. Yeah,
that's a lot. Again it is. So that's yeah, and
they're they're actually generating power there that Fundy. But what's
crazy is that that when we talked about in Britain
(09:19):
France um two forty megawatts the Bay of fundy with
that enormous transfer of seawater in and out still only
generates a twenty megawatt um power twenty megawatts of power,
twenty megawatt power just one. So one way they can
do this, Josh, is with uh, like rivers with a dam. Right,
(09:40):
they can build a title dam essentially and it operates
kind of in the same way, which is how buddy,
they don't know if we need to explain that gates
open up. It's called a beverage or is it a
beverage or barrage barage and the tides Uh. When there's
an adequate difference in the level of water on the
oposite side of the dam, the gate opens and allows
(10:03):
water to flow in across the turbine spinds. The turbine
creates h electricity via generator. Right, So anytime you're talking
about wave action or the movement of water, UH, there's
going to be some sort of turbine or piston involved
because that's all you need and it's going to generate electricity.
(10:25):
It still blows me away that that's possible. Yeah, but
it's so simple too. We just have to figure out
how to do it more efficiently and then you know,
we'll be able to come up with this nice grab
bag of energy providers. It's right. Yeah, ocean tides Josh
into title currents is another way. Yeah, what are title currents? Well,
(10:46):
title currents are well what bring in the tides? Are
the currents that are created by the tides coming in
and out. Right. The problem with the title currents is
that they're not constant. Like you said, they happen twice
a day in and out each twice a day, right,
too high, too low. So you've got four tidal currents.
If you're set up to um generate power as it's
(11:09):
going in and out, well, how would you do that? Though?
Underwater turbines it's basically like a wind underwater wind farm.
I didn't realize that, like sixty six foot propellers underwater spinning.
But that's what they put. Was it the East River?
That's what they put in New York? They had these
in there. Still, Yeah, well at least two more than that.
(11:30):
We'll get to that. It's it's paying off finally, So Chuck,
that's that's electrical. As as we said electrical, there's going
to be some sort of turbine or piston that is
moved up and down by the the either the well
the movement of water, whether it's waves, currents, tides, whatever.
But then there's also um thermal energy big time. You
(11:52):
want the stat Yeah, the ocean, the sun provides the
equivalent of two hundred and fifty billion barrels of oil
per day. Yeah in the ocean. Yeah, that's that's a lot. Yeah,
that's a lot. More sits out there and collects all
this heat from the ocean. I think in the unit
in the US we use twenty one million barrels of
(12:15):
oil a day. And this is now the problem is
is like that's across the entire ocean, that's across the
Earth's surface. We we don't know how to do that.
We're still working with full of vite ex cels, like
how does this work? How do we make this happen?
So that's that's as much as we could ever possibly capture, right,
but still even if we get a significant portion of
(12:37):
that and can convert it into energy, we're on easy Street. Explain,
Oh tech is ocean thermal energy conversion? Right? Yeah, that's
how they do it, and there's a couple of ways
to do it. There's a closed system there's an open system,
and there's a hybrid system, which is open and closed
system mixed together. So with a closed system, um, you
(12:57):
usually you take some sort of low boiling point liquid
like ammonia, which has a boiling point of like negative
twenty eight degrees fahrenheit, right, which I don't understand how
windex works. Then that's something I think we need to
look up index works. Yeah, has ammonia in it? Right?
How is it kept liquid? Because I can tell you
(13:18):
my the the area under my sink is warmer than
negative twenty degrees fahrenheit. Yeah, I mean, but there's bottles
of ammonia to just playing ammonia. Right. I guess Bill
O'Reilly was right, Chuck. Um. So in a close in
a closed system, you take ammonia, um, you expose it
(13:39):
to sea water warmer seawater, right, uh, and it immediately
vaporizes into gas. As that gas expands, it pushes a turbine.
There's another turbine, right, It's like a steam engine. Wood
powers a generator, and then the gas has moved into
another chamber where it encounters co old sea water and
(14:01):
converts back into liquid, and it's pumped back into the
original chamber again. See I love systems like this where
it's just a loop. Stuff becomes vapor, then it goes
back to what it was, then it becomes vapor again.
Seems real efficient, closed system, right yes, yes, And then
there's the open system, right yeah, And that's a little
bit of a different principle. It's warm surface water, but
(14:24):
he's a vacuum chamber. They move all the air and
because of magic, when you do this, the seawater boils.
Is that insane clown posse? I think so? So it
actually boils and that produces steam, like pure water steam,
and then that can drive the turbine. And then just
like with the ammonia, you pump cold sea water back
(14:45):
in cools, the steam changes it back into water and
back again back again. The cool part about this is
they can create fresh water as sort of a byproduct,
which is awesome. That's huge desalienation is they've had a
lot of t auble doing that successfully in a large
scale right right. Um we talked about that in manufacturing
water and some of the other ones. Um. But yeah,
(15:07):
if you if you create the steam out of sea water,
they found that it's almost pure water, pure freshwater. No
salt and you can drink that. So yeah, they're trying
to figure out how to use open cycle systems and
the hybrid system, which, like I said, combines closed in
open systems. Um, but both the hybrid and the open
(15:28):
create fresh water. And I think they figured out that
a single too megawatt oh tech plant, either open or hybrid,
could produce cubic meters of desalinated water every day, which
is that I can't drink that much. Yeah, you can
drink that much coffee. I do, which is why I
(15:51):
spill it right now. Unfortunately, otech systems aren't producing a
lot of electricity, but they think that the potential there
is pretty great. Other people are investing in that at
this point. Yeah, that seems to be the one that's
attracting the most investment dollars right now. I wonder why, uh,
what do you mean why people are going that way? Yeah,
(16:11):
I don't know. Maybe it's the most efficient, cost effective
way at this point, who knows. I think it's actually
the most expensive, to tell you the truth. Really, I
mean it's not the most efficient it maybe it's true,
but it's it's the most expensive. I think. Well, right now,
what's going on is there's a lot of research and
development happening and all these fields because they think the
ocean is really where it's at. We talked about Verdant Power. UM,
(16:36):
here's a little update on their system. They are in
phase three right now. They, like you said, they had
some problems in the demonstration phase because marine environments are
pretty rough on everything. Just ask anyone who like lives
on the beach with a car. Some fishes like I'm
swimming here. That's true. We'll get to that as controversial.
(16:58):
UH talked about it before, but yeah, that's true. In
the demonstration period though, they did produced a free flow system.
They produced elect They called it excellent hydrodynamic, mechanical and
electrical performance grid connect the power with no quality problems,
fully by directional, continuous unattended operation. So they don't even
(17:22):
have some dude down there right. I wonder how it's
that job would pay exactly. In the end, they produced
seventy megawatt hours of energy to two end users and
UM right now, they applied for a permit basically in
just a couple of months ago. Last month in December,
they applied for a permit to make it real, and
(17:42):
they're waiting on. All of that was just they just
wrote that story down there, like now let's make this real. Well,
they want to do it, you know, in earnest and
not just demonstrate, and they think they're at that point now.
So they're waiting on I think right now they're waiting
on New York City to say, take over the East
River or this portion of it and do it so
to megawatts uh, seventy megawatt hours of energy families to
(18:06):
two end users. I don't think they were families. I
think they were probably power plants or something. Ohh gotcha,
Yeah are you sure? No, I'm not because then user
could also be like some guy with a hot plate
and he's like, hey, I'm my hot plates working just fine.
The UK is is who is leading title turbine research
right now, though, So hats off to you, is it
(18:26):
the UK? I thought this has something? Well, no, they're
they're all dabbling in its Spain in Portugal, but the
UK is currently ahead of the game in in this
kind of stuff so far. Wow. Well, yeah, that's off
for sure. And yeah they took the mantle from the
French and ran with it, right The French are like,
it's two accents for me to zero for you today.
(18:48):
That's a switch. So why is this good? Why are
we doing this? What are the environmental advantages? Well, one
of the things we said was the um with wave energy. Right,
I didn't give you a stat that's going to blow
your mind. Wave energy alone, right, the kinnectic energy found
in the motion on the ocean, right could point zero
(19:11):
two percent of that, right, could power the entire planet.
Point zero two I'm sorry, point of the energy, and
ocean waves could power the entire But still it's pretty
impressive point to, not two point anything point to. So
what you're saying is we just need to be able
to harness a very tiny percentage. Yes. Plus also the
(19:33):
good thing, the good thing about waves, which is why
I throw my weight behind it. As compared to a
wind farm, right, Um, you've got three times the density, right,
so conceivably moving it about the same rate as as
you know, wind five knots or something like that, you
would have three times the amount of energy capable of
(19:53):
being captured and transferred into usable electricity. Yeah, it says
a current, a water current, ocean current running five miles
an hour can turn a tidal turbine thirty revolutions per minute,
and that is very much more than the wind. Well,
just and don't forget. I mean we're talking about turbines
that are propellers that are sixty ft across each. I
(20:15):
mean that's a lot, yes, thirty times a minute, it's
like almost once every few seconds. Uh. They also run
silent and run deep. So a lot of people complain
about the noise of wind farms, the buzzing, the buzzing,
the constant buzzing, the aerodynamics noise, and you know they're
(20:35):
underwater so you don't see it. Is. The funny thing
is that's such a like a human centric way of
looking at it, like, oh, it doesn't make any noise
because we're above water, right, who cares about what it
sounds like below water? Surely placing these things in the
ocean are going to have like a huge impact, right well,
and that's the downside. Might as well get to that.
You can't you can't just throw these things in the
(20:57):
ocean and have no impact on marine life. Gonna kill
some fish, definitely disrupt some some spawning patterns will take
Like an otech system, right, a closed otech system, if
say it's battered about by a particularly bad typhoon, that
closed system may not be closed any longer, and you've
got a massive ammonia spill in a local area in
(21:19):
the ocean, and yeah, that's gonna kill some fish, right. Um,
same with any grease that you might need to keep
a piston moving properly. There's just there's a lot of
factors involved. But conceivably, I'm I'm pretty sure you could
do a um what are those called that that risk
(21:39):
assessment people do, like a cost benefit analysis versus say
something like a power plant UH is spewing out right?
How how much couldn't you compare that pretty easily? I think?
And I wonder if if the impact would be much
less severe on ocean environment than right above ground. Well,
(22:03):
there's going to be an impact. You can't create electricity
without some sort of impact on something in the environments,
like making so exactly got to break a few eggs.
So I think the ideal is to find the minimal
impact with the maximum payoff. Right now, it is not
ocean UH power because it's still heavily in the R
(22:24):
and D phase, which means it's expensive. But as the
kinks get worked out, like the solar panels were, I
mean they're still expensive, but they were way more expensive
twenty years ago because they didn't work right all the
time and you had to put more money into making
them work right. But once you get the kinks worked out,
it becomes a little more efficient, little cheaper. So maybe
it'll it'll close that gap a bit. Yeah, my my
(22:45):
money and I think we should talk about why tides,
title damns barages don't are have are problematic problem because
they kind of captured my attention, like I was thinking, well, yeah,
it's build some hydro electric electric damns these forty sites
and that will help tremendously. Sure. Part of the problem
is the whole point of um title movement in a bay,
(23:07):
or one of the benefits of it, UH is to
filter out impurities, silt, crud, dead crayfish, all that stuff
sucked out and you know turned into food or you
know filtered into the rest of the ocean. Right If
you have a damn there, that's that's UH making that
more difficult or preventing that. In some cases, the local
(23:29):
environment around that bay suffers because the water purity plummets.
My money's on wave converter wave energy converters like Salter's duck.
Plus we found out that damns on the earth can
potentially cause earthquakes. Wonder I mean, I wonder if we
could have an effect under the seafloor as well. Yeah,
learn the hard way sometimes, we definitely do. Actually that's
(23:52):
the only way humans learned. Chuck. Yeah, agreed. Well, if
you want to learn more about Salter's duck, this a
sterious thing I've just now mentioned, I would recommend you
type that in S A L T E R apostrophe
s in the handy search bar How stuff works dot Com.
Also required reading for this one is wave energy type
(24:13):
that in and ocean power. That'll just bring up everything
right there. Read those three, and uh, listen to this
podcast and just start spewing out information whenever somebody's like,
I love oil, Yeah for coal? Yeah, you know, we
need to do a show on his mountaintop removal coal mining.
Have you heard of that? Yeah, that's that's tough stuff
(24:36):
that makes releasing lubricants into the ocean through an o
tech system look like nothing exactly. Yeah. Alright, well, yeah,
I said handy search bar already, right, listener, mail Josh,
I'm gonna call this one of a hundred or more
ocular migraine emails. I would say at least the hundred.
(24:57):
We've heard from a lot of people who suffer from
the ease, and we came We've got the idea. Right.
I want to say to everyone that I'm sorry you
have to deal with this stuff. But I picked out
one from David in the UK because I like a
UK Did that have a funny accent? It did? Hey, guys,
just listen to the migraine podcast. I'm responding to your call.
I was first diagnosed with migraines at fourteen. I'm now
(25:19):
forty seven. When I had an extreme port of of
dizziness at fourteen, it made me nauseous, preventing me from
standing because the room was spinning, preventing my eyes from
remaining still if I look to the right jittered. I've
not had a particular episode like this since, but the
migraine symptoms have changed over the years. Up to the
early twenties, I would get tunnel vision. I could only
(25:41):
see what was directly what I was directly looking at
about fifteen percent of my vision. The rest was all swirly.
Imagine looking through a scene through two highly polished steel tubes.
From then on, it was the opposite. The subject I
was looking at would disappear, but the outer part was clear.
Imagine looking at some twenty ft away, but look directly
(26:02):
at their face. Their head disappeared. Peculiar thing. I think
that's peculiar enough. The peculiar thing is that it didn't
look odd until I thought about it. Somewhat like a
blind spot test. Yeah, blind spots are very um common,
so well, sure they're just concerued. Uh. There's a very
(26:22):
mild headache following an episode, similar to eyestrain, and sometimes
a feeling which I can only describe as an empty
space in my head that feels as though it should
have a sign saying headache to be erected here soon.
That's not age, that's not touch wood, guys. I have
not had an episode in waking hours for about four
years now, and notice no more morning symptoms, which I
(26:44):
attribute to being on permanent statin medication for high cholesterol.
You know, here in America we don't touch wood. We not.
So that's from David in the UK. And uh, for
everyone suffering from ocular migraines, I'm so right, yes, same,
it sounds awful. He talked about um his eyes when
(27:06):
he looked to the right, his eyes trembling back and forth.
Do you remember that actor whose whose eyes like went
back and forth all the time. He was in h
what's the one with John Cusack where there's a murder
John Cusack? Ray Leota say anything? Oh the hotel thing? Yeah, yeah,
that was awful. What was the name of the movie though,
Oh I can't remember. Well, he played the guy, like
(27:29):
the bad guy in that one. But he was also
in a movie with Mickey Rourke. His eyes twitchy. Yeah,
that's just like what the actor was known for. Like,
they just moved back and forth in a really weird way.
So if you can tell me what movie that that
guy appeared with with Mickey Rourke? All right, yeah, I
want to hear Okay, right, I think we should. Well,
(27:49):
we can't do contests anymore, can't we. You know, actors
always list have you ever seen a head shot? They
always list on the back their special things they can do. Yeah,
this is always like horseback riding, BURPONCM man accents and
this guy head high twitch right, it's crazy. I can't
believe you haven't seen it. I probably haven't just didn't
notice it or something. Well, if you can tell me
(28:09):
what movie he was in with Mickey work. I want
to hear it. Wrap it up in an email and
send it to stuff Podcasts at how stuff works dot com.
For moral on this and thousands of other topics. Is
that how stuff works dot com. To learn more about
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(28:32):
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Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from House Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chucker's Bryant
that makes this stuff you should know? And the heavy
(00:22):
index finger of Matt Frederick. Yeah did you hear that?
Oh yeah, it was like an ant boat coming down
on something. Nobody push his record, Like Maddie, one of
my friends has um finger tips, just the fingertips that
look very much like big toes all across and um,
they're big. He has big, huge fingertips. Is is what
(00:43):
you like? The finger is just narrow and then it
balloons up at the end really freakishly. So he'd be
a good bass player, I would think, maybe, So I'll
ask him you should do that, Chuck. Do you remember
we have talked about capturing enter g right, because energy
can neither be created nor destroyed, It can only be captured.
(01:05):
We talked about several ways to do this. Yes, well,
one of the ways we talked about, um was by
putting basically what amount to wind turbines underwater, and there
was a we did under water turbines. Yeah, sure we did, right,
I think so it's hard to tell these days. Well,
if we didn't, that's good because we're going to cover
that again in this podcast. I think we did because
(01:27):
we talked about Verdant technology and they were the ones
who put some in the Hudson, didn't we East River? Yes? Sure? Okay, so,
um they put some into two thousand and six. It was,
you know, to to wide acclaim. This is a huge project.
They were gonna just power large parts of New York
with this technology. And they went back to check on
(01:47):
them and they found that, um, all but two of
their wind turbines were just completely in shambles. It's one
of the great challenges in underwater energy production BINGO. I
have updates on them. We'll get to that later though. Okay,
(02:08):
luckily for us, right, because the the ocean and well
bodies of water are this huge untapped resource, well mostly
untapped resource of energy, there are other ways to capture
energy from the ocean, right, which is what we're going
to talk about today. Let's do it, and let's start
with the French, because apparently they've long known they're all
(02:28):
over it. Yeah, we like all of the major innovations
that we're pursuing right now came from the French over
the last couple of centuries, right who knew, Well, we
should just mention the history in in uh long time ago,
a frenchy and his son who I could not find
their names. I couldn't either, but they had a pretty
(02:49):
cool idea. They attached a big lever to the side
of their boat, and when the ocean moved up and down,
the lever moved up and down, which could potentially power
pumps and saws and things like that. Right, and let's
cat showing the mechanical energy of wave motion. Very good sense.
But unfortunately, well or maybe fortunately, the steam engine came
along kind of rendered that. Unfortunately for him, his idea
(03:11):
was rendered moot. But thanks to the rest of us,
because steam energy turned out to be a pretty cool
thing the steam engine did. About a hundred years after that,
another Frenchman used heat energy from the ocean to generate power,
but it was not very cost effective, so that died
as well. And then uh nineteen sixty six there was
(03:32):
finally some success once again in France. In Britain, Yeah,
and the on the Ross River and uh, it still
operates today, and it is actually, from what I can tell,
that the biggest success, right, that's yeah, and it's because
it's actually generating electricity quite a bit, two D forty megawatts,
which is uh about that's better than a wind farm
(03:54):
and that's yeah that typical. Not quite as good as
a coal fire power plant, but um it is better
than a typic coal wind farm, and um it is
far and away I think the most successful UH Ocean
Energy UM outfit running right now. Right. Yeah, well that's
on the river though, was it. Yeah, So it's capturing
(04:14):
the energy of the tide. There's also you can you
can capture the energy of the heat differential, right, and
you can capture the mechanical energy right with ways. There's
three ways, three at least, yeah, yeah, exactly right, because
there's also the currents underwater turbines. It's four, I mean,
(04:34):
the ways to capture energy. Right, let's talk about ways.
This one is my favorite because there's so much to it. Right,
there's mechanical energy that can be captured, kinetic energy that
can be converted into useful mechanical energy. Basically, what you
do is you want to power somehow power turbine or
(04:55):
a piston to create electric city from a generator. Right. Yeah,
and waves move thanks to the wind, create big crest
and troughs. And at one point someone looked at those
and said, hey, that's pretty consistent. I bet we could
capture that. Um. It is very consistent, is very predictable, right, Um.
(05:17):
Waves are found all over the place, so they actually
can bring energy from other parts of the globe to you,
to you, top of the muffin, to you. Uh and um,
let's talk about how a wave comes up. Did you
read this? No, because you're the expert. You're the wave expert.
All right. So waves are the result of a transfer
(05:38):
of solar energy to the water, to the ocean. Okay,
so did you know that wind is really just a
creation of solar energy, solar radiation, solar heat, and that
ends up driving the wave. Yes, But it's interesting how
it starts with the sun. It does. It does start
with the sun, Chuck, thanks for that segue. Um, this
(06:00):
sun does not heat the earth evenly, right, right, So
there's different pockets of air, surface air that are heated
more quickly than others. They rise, okay, and as they rise,
the colder air rushes in and the movement of the
colder air to fill in the space left by the
warmer air. That's wind. That's wind. That's awesome. Okay. So
(06:24):
when this, when this water, when the ocean is pushed
by wind enough, long enough, hard enough, fast enough for
far enough distances, waves pick up, right, And that that
gives even more traction to the wind. So the waves
just get bigger and bigger. That's why a good storm
will produce bigger waves. Right. But what you have is
(06:45):
kinetic energy pushing the water into waves, and that kinetic
energy becomes stored in the wave. Right. So the wave
isn't a bunch of moving water. The water actually, as
this kinetic energy rolls over, it acts as a conveyor belt,
so it moves in a scular motion and delivers this
big dent amount of kinetic energy to you to capture
(07:07):
if you have a wave converter. Uh, handy, exactly, dude,
Very nice explanation, was it? Yeah? Thanks man? I think so.
It's been a little while since I got one. Right.
Shall we talk about tides now? Yes, much to the
chagrin of Bill O'Reilly, we do know what causes tide.
I'm glad you meant did you see that? Bill O'Reilly
didn't know that the pull of the moon, the gravitational
(07:30):
force of the moon, is what creates tides. What's crazy
is that the atheist was like, well, we don't know,
but still he was a little flustered. I can he
was flustered, but a real opportunity to be like everybody
that saw that was on the edge of their seats saying,
say it the moon, and the guy was like, yeah, well. Unfortunately,
no steps in there to correct him. I haven't heard
(07:51):
a response from him either. I'm curious who Bill O'Reilly. Yeah,
I don't think he's going to come out and address it.
At this point, he already looked dumb enough. He didn't care. Okay,
so uh, for those of you don't know what you're
talking about quickly. Bill O'Reilly was interviewing the head of
the Atheists of America and said, he explains God by
the fact that no one can explain what causes tides.
(08:12):
The tides go out, tides come in every day, and
we can't explain it, and no one knows why. I
think is what he said. So anyway, it is in
fact caused by the gravitational pull of the moon. Mr
O'Reilly and Uh. The cool thing about tides is there
everywhere along the coast. They all coastal areas experienced too
high tides and two low tides every day and they're
(08:34):
pretty much on the button. The unfortunate thing is there's
only about forty places around the Earth where you can
generate electricity from this because the difference between high and
low tide has to be at least sixteen feet and
that doesn't happen everywhere. So there's like forty sites around
the world that are suitable. Forty sites and the Bay
of Fundy I don't think we mentioned yet that is
where they're actually doing this, and it's it's a great place. Yeah,
(08:57):
it's um a narrow inlet and has the highest tides
in the world fifty feet in a very short cycle,
so in six hours they can produce a hundred and
ten billion tons of seawater flow in and out. Yeah,
that's a lot. Again it is. So that's yeah, and
they're they're actually generating power there that Fundy. But what's
crazy is that that when we talked about in Britain
(09:19):
France um two forty megawatts the Bay of fundy with
that enormous transfer of seawater in and out still only
generates a twenty megawatt um power twenty megawatts of power,
twenty megawatt power just one. So one way they can
do this, Josh, is with uh, like rivers with a dam. Right,
(09:40):
they can build a title dam essentially and it operates
kind of in the same way, which is how buddy,
they don't know if we need to explain that gates
open up. It's called a beverage or is it a
beverage or barrage barage and the tides Uh. When there's
an adequate difference in the level of water on the
oposite side of the dam, the gate opens and allows
(10:03):
water to flow in across the turbine spinds. The turbine
creates h electricity via generator. Right, So anytime you're talking
about wave action or the movement of water, UH, there's
going to be some sort of turbine or piston involved
because that's all you need and it's going to generate electricity.
(10:25):
It still blows me away that that's possible. Yeah, but
it's so simple too. We just have to figure out
how to do it more efficiently and then you know,
we'll be able to come up with this nice grab
bag of energy providers. It's right. Yeah, ocean tides Josh
into title currents is another way. Yeah, what are title currents? Well,
(10:46):
title currents are well what bring in the tides? Are
the currents that are created by the tides coming in
and out. Right. The problem with the title currents is
that they're not constant. Like you said, they happen twice
a day in and out each twice a day, right,
too high, too low. So you've got four tidal currents.
If you're set up to um generate power as it's
(11:09):
going in and out, well, how would you do that? Though?
Underwater turbines it's basically like a wind underwater wind farm.
I didn't realize that, like sixty six foot propellers underwater spinning.
But that's what they put. Was it the East River?
That's what they put in New York? They had these
in there. Still, Yeah, well at least two more than that.
(11:30):
We'll get to that. It's it's paying off finally, So Chuck,
that's that's electrical. As as we said electrical, there's going
to be some sort of turbine or piston that is
moved up and down by the the either the well
the movement of water, whether it's waves, currents, tides, whatever.
But then there's also um thermal energy big time. You
(11:52):
want the stat Yeah, the ocean, the sun provides the
equivalent of two hundred and fifty billion barrels of oil
per day. Yeah in the ocean. Yeah, that's that's a lot. Yeah,
that's a lot. More sits out there and collects all
this heat from the ocean. I think in the unit
in the US we use twenty one million barrels of
(12:15):
oil a day. And this is now the problem is
is like that's across the entire ocean, that's across the
Earth's surface. We we don't know how to do that.
We're still working with full of vite ex cels, like
how does this work? How do we make this happen?
So that's that's as much as we could ever possibly capture, right,
but still even if we get a significant portion of
(12:37):
that and can convert it into energy, we're on easy Street. Explain,
Oh tech is ocean thermal energy conversion? Right? Yeah, that's
how they do it, and there's a couple of ways
to do it. There's a closed system there's an open system,
and there's a hybrid system, which is open and closed
system mixed together. So with a closed system, um, you
(12:57):
usually you take some sort of low boiling point liquid
like ammonia, which has a boiling point of like negative
twenty eight degrees fahrenheit, right, which I don't understand how
windex works. Then that's something I think we need to
look up index works. Yeah, has ammonia in it? Right?
How is it kept liquid? Because I can tell you
(13:18):
my the the area under my sink is warmer than
negative twenty degrees fahrenheit. Yeah, I mean, but there's bottles
of ammonia to just playing ammonia. Right. I guess Bill
O'Reilly was right, Chuck. Um. So in a close in
a closed system, you take ammonia, um, you expose it
(13:39):
to sea water warmer seawater, right, uh, and it immediately
vaporizes into gas. As that gas expands, it pushes a turbine.
There's another turbine, right, It's like a steam engine. Wood
powers a generator, and then the gas has moved into
another chamber where it encounters co old sea water and
(14:01):
converts back into liquid, and it's pumped back into the
original chamber again. See I love systems like this where
it's just a loop. Stuff becomes vapor, then it goes
back to what it was, then it becomes vapor again.
Seems real efficient, closed system, right yes, yes, And then
there's the open system, right yeah, And that's a little
bit of a different principle. It's warm surface water, but
(14:24):
he's a vacuum chamber. They move all the air and
because of magic, when you do this, the seawater boils.
Is that insane clown posse? I think so? So it
actually boils and that produces steam, like pure water steam,
and then that can drive the turbine. And then just
like with the ammonia, you pump cold sea water back
(14:45):
in cools, the steam changes it back into water and
back again back again. The cool part about this is
they can create fresh water as sort of a byproduct,
which is awesome. That's huge desalienation is they've had a
lot of t auble doing that successfully in a large
scale right right. Um we talked about that in manufacturing
water and some of the other ones. Um. But yeah,
(15:07):
if you if you create the steam out of sea water,
they found that it's almost pure water, pure freshwater. No
salt and you can drink that. So yeah, they're trying
to figure out how to use open cycle systems and
the hybrid system, which, like I said, combines closed in
open systems. Um, but both the hybrid and the open
(15:28):
create fresh water. And I think they figured out that
a single too megawatt oh tech plant, either open or hybrid,
could produce cubic meters of desalinated water every day, which
is that I can't drink that much. Yeah, you can
drink that much coffee. I do, which is why I
(15:51):
spill it right now. Unfortunately, otech systems aren't producing a
lot of electricity, but they think that the potential there
is pretty great. Other people are investing in that at
this point. Yeah, that seems to be the one that's
attracting the most investment dollars right now. I wonder why, uh,
what do you mean why people are going that way? Yeah,
(16:11):
I don't know. Maybe it's the most efficient, cost effective
way at this point, who knows. I think it's actually
the most expensive, to tell you the truth. Really, I
mean it's not the most efficient it maybe it's true,
but it's it's the most expensive. I think. Well, right now,
what's going on is there's a lot of research and
development happening and all these fields because they think the
ocean is really where it's at. We talked about Verdant Power. UM,
(16:36):
here's a little update on their system. They are in
phase three right now. They, like you said, they had
some problems in the demonstration phase because marine environments are
pretty rough on everything. Just ask anyone who like lives
on the beach with a car. Some fishes like I'm
swimming here. That's true. We'll get to that as controversial.
(16:58):
UH talked about it before, but yeah, that's true. In
the demonstration period though, they did produced a free flow system.
They produced elect They called it excellent hydrodynamic, mechanical and
electrical performance grid connect the power with no quality problems,
fully by directional, continuous unattended operation. So they don't even
(17:22):
have some dude down there right. I wonder how it's
that job would pay exactly. In the end, they produced
seventy megawatt hours of energy to two end users and
UM right now, they applied for a permit basically in
just a couple of months ago. Last month in December,
they applied for a permit to make it real, and
(17:42):
they're waiting on. All of that was just they just
wrote that story down there, like now let's make this real. Well,
they want to do it, you know, in earnest and
not just demonstrate, and they think they're at that point now.
So they're waiting on I think right now they're waiting
on New York City to say, take over the East
River or this portion of it and do it so
to megawatts uh, seventy megawatt hours of energy families to
(18:06):
two end users. I don't think they were families. I
think they were probably power plants or something. Ohh gotcha,
Yeah are you sure? No, I'm not because then user
could also be like some guy with a hot plate
and he's like, hey, I'm my hot plates working just fine.
The UK is is who is leading title turbine research
right now, though, So hats off to you, is it
(18:26):
the UK? I thought this has something? Well, no, they're
they're all dabbling in its Spain in Portugal, but the
UK is currently ahead of the game in in this
kind of stuff so far. Wow. Well, yeah, that's off
for sure. And yeah they took the mantle from the
French and ran with it, right The French are like,
it's two accents for me to zero for you today.
(18:48):
That's a switch. So why is this good? Why are
we doing this? What are the environmental advantages? Well, one
of the things we said was the um with wave energy. Right,
I didn't give you a stat that's going to blow
your mind. Wave energy alone, right, the kinnectic energy found
in the motion on the ocean, right could point zero
(19:11):
two percent of that, right, could power the entire planet.
Point zero two I'm sorry, point of the energy, and
ocean waves could power the entire But still it's pretty
impressive point to, not two point anything point to. So
what you're saying is we just need to be able
to harness a very tiny percentage. Yes. Plus also the
(19:33):
good thing, the good thing about waves, which is why
I throw my weight behind it. As compared to a
wind farm, right, Um, you've got three times the density, right,
so conceivably moving it about the same rate as as
you know, wind five knots or something like that, you
would have three times the amount of energy capable of
(19:53):
being captured and transferred into usable electricity. Yeah, it says
a current, a water current, ocean current running five miles
an hour can turn a tidal turbine thirty revolutions per minute,
and that is very much more than the wind. Well,
just and don't forget. I mean we're talking about turbines
that are propellers that are sixty ft across each. I
(20:15):
mean that's a lot, yes, thirty times a minute, it's
like almost once every few seconds. Uh. They also run
silent and run deep. So a lot of people complain
about the noise of wind farms, the buzzing, the buzzing,
the constant buzzing, the aerodynamics noise, and you know they're
(20:35):
underwater so you don't see it. Is. The funny thing
is that's such a like a human centric way of
looking at it, like, oh, it doesn't make any noise
because we're above water, right, who cares about what it
sounds like below water? Surely placing these things in the
ocean are going to have like a huge impact, right well,
and that's the downside. Might as well get to that.
You can't you can't just throw these things in the
(20:57):
ocean and have no impact on marine life. Gonna kill
some fish, definitely disrupt some some spawning patterns will take
Like an otech system, right, a closed otech system, if
say it's battered about by a particularly bad typhoon, that
closed system may not be closed any longer, and you've
got a massive ammonia spill in a local area in
(21:19):
the ocean, and yeah, that's gonna kill some fish, right. Um,
same with any grease that you might need to keep
a piston moving properly. There's just there's a lot of
factors involved. But conceivably, I'm I'm pretty sure you could
do a um what are those called that that risk
(21:39):
assessment people do, like a cost benefit analysis versus say
something like a power plant UH is spewing out right?
How how much couldn't you compare that pretty easily? I think?
And I wonder if if the impact would be much
less severe on ocean environment than right above ground. Well,
(22:03):
there's going to be an impact. You can't create electricity
without some sort of impact on something in the environments,
like making so exactly got to break a few eggs.
So I think the ideal is to find the minimal
impact with the maximum payoff. Right now, it is not
ocean UH power because it's still heavily in the R
(22:24):
and D phase, which means it's expensive. But as the
kinks get worked out, like the solar panels were, I
mean they're still expensive, but they were way more expensive
twenty years ago because they didn't work right all the
time and you had to put more money into making
them work right. But once you get the kinks worked out,
it becomes a little more efficient, little cheaper. So maybe
it'll it'll close that gap a bit. Yeah, my my
(22:45):
money and I think we should talk about why tides,
title damns barages don't are have are problematic problem because
they kind of captured my attention, like I was thinking, well, yeah,
it's build some hydro electric electric damns these forty sites
and that will help tremendously. Sure. Part of the problem
is the whole point of um title movement in a bay,
(23:07):
or one of the benefits of it, UH is to
filter out impurities, silt, crud, dead crayfish, all that stuff
sucked out and you know turned into food or you
know filtered into the rest of the ocean. Right If
you have a damn there, that's that's UH making that
more difficult or preventing that. In some cases, the local
(23:29):
environment around that bay suffers because the water purity plummets.
My money's on wave converter wave energy converters like Salter's duck.
Plus we found out that damns on the earth can
potentially cause earthquakes. Wonder I mean, I wonder if we
could have an effect under the seafloor as well. Yeah,
learn the hard way sometimes, we definitely do. Actually that's
(23:52):
the only way humans learned. Chuck. Yeah, agreed. Well, if
you want to learn more about Salter's duck, this a
sterious thing I've just now mentioned, I would recommend you
type that in S A L T E R apostrophe
s in the handy search bar How stuff works dot Com.
Also required reading for this one is wave energy type
(24:13):
that in and ocean power. That'll just bring up everything
right there. Read those three, and uh, listen to this
podcast and just start spewing out information whenever somebody's like,
I love oil, Yeah for coal? Yeah, you know, we
need to do a show on his mountaintop removal coal mining.
Have you heard of that? Yeah, that's that's tough stuff
(24:36):
that makes releasing lubricants into the ocean through an o
tech system look like nothing exactly. Yeah. Alright, well, yeah,
I said handy search bar already, right, listener, mail Josh,
I'm gonna call this one of a hundred or more
ocular migraine emails. I would say at least the hundred.
(24:57):
We've heard from a lot of people who suffer from
the ease, and we came We've got the idea. Right.
I want to say to everyone that I'm sorry you
have to deal with this stuff. But I picked out
one from David in the UK because I like a
UK Did that have a funny accent? It did? Hey, guys,
just listen to the migraine podcast. I'm responding to your call.
I was first diagnosed with migraines at fourteen. I'm now
(25:19):
forty seven. When I had an extreme port of of
dizziness at fourteen, it made me nauseous, preventing me from
standing because the room was spinning, preventing my eyes from
remaining still if I look to the right jittered. I've
not had a particular episode like this since, but the
migraine symptoms have changed over the years. Up to the
early twenties, I would get tunnel vision. I could only
(25:41):
see what was directly what I was directly looking at
about fifteen percent of my vision. The rest was all swirly.
Imagine looking through a scene through two highly polished steel tubes.
From then on, it was the opposite. The subject I
was looking at would disappear, but the outer part was clear.
Imagine looking at some twenty ft away, but look directly
(26:02):
at their face. Their head disappeared. Peculiar thing. I think
that's peculiar enough. The peculiar thing is that it didn't
look odd until I thought about it. Somewhat like a
blind spot test. Yeah, blind spots are very um common,
so well, sure they're just concerued. Uh. There's a very
(26:22):
mild headache following an episode, similar to eyestrain, and sometimes
a feeling which I can only describe as an empty
space in my head that feels as though it should
have a sign saying headache to be erected here soon.
That's not age, that's not touch wood, guys. I have
not had an episode in waking hours for about four
years now, and notice no more morning symptoms, which I
(26:44):
attribute to being on permanent statin medication for high cholesterol.
You know, here in America we don't touch wood. We not.
So that's from David in the UK. And uh, for
everyone suffering from ocular migraines, I'm so right, yes, same,
it sounds awful. He talked about um his eyes when
(27:06):
he looked to the right, his eyes trembling back and forth.
Do you remember that actor whose whose eyes like went
back and forth all the time. He was in h
what's the one with John Cusack where there's a murder
John Cusack? Ray Leota say anything? Oh the hotel thing? Yeah, yeah,
that was awful. What was the name of the movie though,
Oh I can't remember. Well, he played the guy, like
(27:29):
the bad guy in that one. But he was also
in a movie with Mickey Rourke. His eyes twitchy. Yeah,
that's just like what the actor was known for. Like,
they just moved back and forth in a really weird way.
So if you can tell me what movie that that
guy appeared with with Mickey Rourke? All right, yeah, I
want to hear Okay, right, I think we should. Well,
(27:49):
we can't do contests anymore, can't we. You know, actors
always list have you ever seen a head shot? They
always list on the back their special things they can do. Yeah,
this is always like horseback riding, BURPONCM man accents and
this guy head high twitch right, it's crazy. I can't
believe you haven't seen it. I probably haven't just didn't
notice it or something. Well, if you can tell me
(28:09):
what movie he was in with Mickey work. I want
to hear it. Wrap it up in an email and
send it to stuff Podcasts at how stuff works dot com.
For moral on this and thousands of other topics. Is
that how stuff works dot com. To learn more about
the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper
right corner of our homepage. The how Stuff Works iPhone
(28:32):
app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes. Brought to
you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready,
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