
First Offshore Turbine For U.S. Begins Feeding Power To Maine’s Grid - protomyth
http://singularityhub.com/2012/11/01/first-offshore-turbine-for-u-s-begins-feeding-power-to-maines-grid/
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fghh45sdfhr3
Also, slowing the moon's escape from our orbit, and helping to maintain the
earth's rotational speed!

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tvladeck
Tidal power is amazing from a grid-cost perspective. Unlike other forms of
renewable energy, you can literally set your clock to the tides, making it
much easier to schedule into the grid. I am so happy to see these advances,
and look forward to other forms of oceanic renewable energy, like wave,
thermal, and offshore wind!

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_delirium
Historical footnote: This same location (Cobscook Bay) was the location of a
cancelled tidal-power project in the 1930s:
<http://www.borderhistoricalsociety.com/quoddydammusuem.html>

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lukethomas
UMaine is also working on offshore wind power -> It's pretty interesting stuff
with a smart guy working on it. Check out this video:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agS-lMsiV-g>

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mercuryrising
Building electricity generators underwater is challenging. If a big storm
comes through, the storm surge will destroy almost everything in its path. You
design a hydropower station so that it will have resistance when the water
passes over it, if you don't have the ability to disengage (wind turbines have
locks and newer ones have adjustable blades) it will get destroyed when large
waves come in (sometimes, all that power is a bad thing).

It's great that we're still attempting these though, the power of the sea is
too tempting to stay away from. Whether or not it works, it will give us
another data point on what to try, or what not to try.

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hcayce
Sounds like an interesting challenge. Has anyone written a longer article or
study about the issue?

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thechut
As a Mainer I am very proud of this. It has been talked about for a long time
in Maine and tidal power is not exactly a new idea. But it's good to see ORPC
finally executing on this idea.

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stephengillie
_The blades of the turbine, shaped like the helical strands of a DNA molecule,
turn as the underwater current passes through them._

Has anyone proposed using these instead of hydroelectric dams? How much will
it affect wildlife? Can fish swim among the turbines?

Edit: video shows these are arranged like lawnmower blades, so the fish would
probably be chewed up. I wonder, if they were turned sideways, so the water
flowed through the center -- would they turn at all?

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mercuryrising
They wouldn't turn, (sort of) like an aircraft wing flying sideways, it is not
designed to create lift in that direction. These blades have big paddles that
catch the force of the water and push it (like a waterwheel).

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R_Edward
Dammit, Jim, I'm a programmer, not a power engineer! So I'm just wondering
whether harnessing tidal power will diminish that power over time, with
results that might make global warming look like a church picnic by
comparison. Conservation of matter and energy and what-not, right?

Of course, if we won't see any knock-on effects till well after the sun has
expanded to incinerate the planet, then shoot, full speed ahead!

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_delirium
I can't seem to find a solid reference, but I recall reading that on a global
scale it's negligible, similar to wind power: the amount of power extracted in
even a deployment much larger-scale than anything we currently envision is a
rounding error compared to the total power in the earth's tidal movements.

There is some research on local environmental effects, however, since the
amount of energy extracted from a particular bay's tidal flows might actually
be noticeable. There's a review of that literature in Section 2 of this paper:
[http://www-civil.eng.ox.ac.uk/research/tidal/EWTEC2009_tidal...](http://www-
civil.eng.ox.ac.uk/research/tidal/EWTEC2009_tidal_basin_paper.pdf)

