energyimperatives

My translation: These companies are slowly pulling the ocean-power-option-rabbit out of the hat, to make it look like it is a new technology, not one that has been obstructed and buried for eight-five years.  They are most probably constrained by fossil fuel or traditional nonrenewable energy groups. They know that the ocean option is a government application.  Fossil fuel and nuclear power iinterests are positioning themselves to have the right to tap into the government’s management of renewable energy technologies as free enterprise players; that is if, and when, the government decides that the atmosphere just might possibly be collapsing, and they can either convince fossil fuel companies to give up their ships of oil, or be wrestled to the renewable energy table by the rest of the world.  

The press is going along, printing small stories here and there, but not doing any in depth stories, on what should be jumped on as a very big story the minute they saw it.   The company Ocean Resource Group, with offices in Miami, and New Brunswick, puts the technologies potential on the line, stating we only need 1% of the available power from ocean currents to light up the world.  Yet, there is literally nothing in the media that says, “O Migosh, here’s the answer to our $700 billion addiction to imported oil.)

Timemagazine’s comprehensive cover story on global warming, done in the spring of 2006, does not mention the huge potential of the hydro-kinetics option, just like their story, so long ago, in their sister publication Fortune, did not mention JFK’s Passamoquoddy Dam proposal. Some things never change, including journalism complicity with political/oil sector positions.  Of course, if the government is in the clutches of  the fossil fuel industry, as Vanity Fair magazine says it is, then we will watch them fiddle while we burn.

There need not be a very large investment and a long payback time for mega tidal technology, however, ocean installations will need the protection of the Navy.  Rivers and streams are possible for free enterprise, but there is another proven technology.

A major technology, invented in 1989 and recipient of the Thomas Edison Award in 1992, is the Gorlov Helical Turbine.  Alexander Gorlov, Prof. Emeritus, Mechanical engineering, Northeastern Univ., Boston, Mass. Has successfully managed demonstration and real time projects with minimal funding from the DOE, but major support from the S. Korea, Brazil, India, and Hawaii where these governments recognize that ocean currents or clean, renewable, and inexpensive relative to the economic and social costs of fossil fuels.

“He imagines thousands of his turbines anchored near remote waterside villages, providing electricity to areas where there is no grid. He imagines pods of them linked together in streams and rivers. Most ambitiously, he imagines floating power farms that would harness the kinetic energy of the world’s major ocean currents. “The Gulf Stream contains enough energy for all of North America,” he says. Imagine a block of 656 Gorlov Helical Turbines anchored off the coast of Florida, where they could not only capture the enormous energy potential of the Gulf Stream, which carries some 80 million cubic meters past Miami’s front door every day, but also produce hydrogen through the electrolysis of ocean water.”¹

Again, we do not need oil, coal, or gas.  We never did.

 ___________________________________________________

 ¹Jill Davis, the former managing editor of OnEarth, has written for Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and other publications.
 OnEarth. Spring 2005 , Copyright 2005 by the Natural Resources Defense Council