Off Shore Wind Power: Something I've been promoting for a long time

The Salon article linked below is not surprising to someone who has been an off shore wind advocate for nearly twenty years now. The only gripe that I would have here is that we give consideration to approaches other than standard, shaft mounted, big propeller turbines.

In fact, within a more comprehensive, fully integrated, big picture approach, the type of turbine ought to be only one part of the consideration. I say that because producing power at sea provides the seed process around which we can build new, floating cities; especially if one structures the design goals properly.

And lets be clear here. As another article in today's news has indicated, sea levels are rising faster than originally thought. The slow moving train wreck that inundation of coastal areas represents is going to require some very out of the ordinary thinking to address. As in: Where are the tens of millions, if not hundred of millions, of people displaced going to live?

This gets me then to the sea based hydrogen production approach that I came up with way back in the eighties; an idea I pitched to Seattle City light while I was working there in the mid nineties. This approach centers around the Yen Tornado turbine technology, as well as a new way to do modular, composite material, scaffold structures strong enough to withstand ocean stresses.

There is an essay within this blog that describes this approach in more detail so I won't go into it any further here. My purpose at this juncture is to simply remind everyone that the dangers we face also offer some amazing opportunities for innovation; especially if we dispense with the idea that one must expect vast amounts of counters before they are motivated to get on with it (some things, as with the production of energy, simply cannot be left in the hands of markets and the profit motive).

The thing to remember here is that time is not on our side. These sorts of things require significant lead times to implement properly. A lot of things have to be checked out, played with, and optimized before they are put into production. That means we need to get started now, even as we begin to debate what an alternative to Capitalism should look like, and how we go about making it happen.



Report: Offshore wind holds twice the promise of offshore drilling