Can Ocean Currents Save the Energy Crisis?

The Tech Ranch

STEVE

We were talking a little bit about politics and I’d mentioned the shortage of diesel fuel, because according to national stores we’re down to 21, 22 days of supply left.

MARLO

Yeah.

STEVE

Because of what’s been going on with the strategic reserve and all kinds of stuff, and it’s a little daunting because the world stops for most people when there’s no diesel, because that’s how we ship.

MARLO

Yep.

STEVE

That’s our connectivity to the supply chain, and we know what happened with the supply chain earlier this year. So, a lot of focus has been taken off of other places. But, if you go back a month and a half, two months ago leading into this political cycle, there was a lot of discussion on climate change and that was a push and now it’s fallen by the wayside because they weren’t getting traction politically with the climate change narrative. So we’ll come back to that after the election, I’m assuming. But, things come and go as it meets political and I say this all the time. It frightens me when things get politicized that are agendas and when you politicize an agenda, then bad things happen. I’m not a fan of that, but you have some legitimate climate change tech.

MARLO

Yeah – and I wouldn’t – this article that I’m bringing you or quoting you from here is gonna be the articles based around climate change but it really is more about producing more energy, more electricity, and that is actually the takeaway for me here because I don’t think anybody can argue the fact that we’re using more and more electricity.

STEVE

Absolutely.

MARLO

The only reason that we haven’t gone up in the last seven or eight years is the conversion of regular lighting to LED that has actually leveled the playing field for seven to eight years. But if you look at the rate of consumption of electricity, moving up to 2013, 2014, the amount of energy that LED saves is just enormous. We’re plugging more things in. We all have more devices that we’re using.

STEVE

Just look at a smart house. The connectivity in every bit of connectivity is using electricity.

MARLO

That’s correct. So, regardless of how you feel about electric vehicles, and even if they’re gonna get off where they’re at right now and really make a significant impact in the world – we’re gonna use more electricity. So, this is interesting to me. Ocean current power. The amount of potential energy in Ocean’s currents is five terawatts. So that’s about five times the energy generation capacity for the whole U.S. So if they can tap into Ocean Currents, then we can basically solve the energy crisis which is interesting.

STEVE

I read – and this was 20 years ago, maybe – an article on producing electricity from tides. The take of the article though, where what they were going after is how to, because you have to be careful and if you screw up tides, bad things can happen. So, you don’t wanna screw with Mother Nature too much. But the take on the article was an opportunity to generate energy from, say, a hurricane. We just take a look at what had happened with Ian down in Florida. Now if you’re able to stop that tide, that flow, whether it’s a net system. And that’s where they were going, because granted, this was 20 years ago at least. They were looking at, we can drop these nets in, it’ll stop the currents and we can change the course of some of these storms. But, then it got taken into the electrical production side of that and now I think they were taking the electricity running it back onto the storm and dissipating a storm that way was the theory on the paper but it was fascinating. Cause my takeaway on it was we can generate a lot of electricity though.

MARLO

Oh my goodness.

STEVE

Now the question is, it’s like where do you run those transmission modes? How do you get it from point A to where it needs to be consumed?

MARLO

Of course, there’s always this talk about, yeah. Imagine there are houses that run totally on wireless power. Now, I’m not sure about the health risks of that, but that’s the thing—

STEVE

You’re living in a microwave.

MARLO

Yeah. That’s crazy. There was a time when there was a talk of doing a solar array in outer space and they tethered that to the Earth so they would be up high enough, so that they could have 24 7 sunlight on this solar ray, and there was this long ass cable—

STEVE

Right now, I don’t see there a solution being out there that is currently in practice, whether it’s wind or solar. It can’t meet the needs of everything that we need if you’re looking at something tidal, but the thing I always worry about, okay, what are the unintended consequences of anything you do now if you screw up, currents and tidal patterns and things like that.

MARLO

And if you’re generating energy from them, you’re just moving it from one thing—

STEVE

Conservation of energy. We have a finite amount of matter on this planet. It just goes from one form to another. If you take energy away from something, because like I said, that paper I was reading was about mitigating hurricanes, but it was the energy side of stuff Great example, if you screw up ocean currents. So think of it in terms of trade winds. I was in Hawaii for some conferences, 2014. It was the fall that it was back to back hurricanes that almost hit Hawaii. There were no trade winds. Now, there’s always a breeze in Hawaii but there were no tradewinds. They were disrupted because of the three hurricanes, which didn’t hit the Hawaiian Islands, but it screwed up the Tradewinds. It screwed up the weather in Hawaii for a month.

So you have to be careful of what you do that might change something. Does it change rainfall? Does it change? Things like that because you’re disrupting weather patterns. I’m a little leery of some of the carbon sequestration stuff. Plants need carbon. So, are you changing the climate with carbon sequestration? Because carbon’s not supposed to be sequestered like that. Now you’re looking at, because of what we’re doing over in Europe right now, people are looking at cutting down forests because they can’t pay the natural gas bill to heat their house. That’s the biggest carbon sink we have. So I’m worried about things like that. Yeah. Now the tidal to me is very interesting because it’s—

MARLO

I think it is too. and I think that if done properly, it’s just another augmentation to what we already have going on, right? You don’t want to take all the energy of the ocean, but you could potentially tap a few things here and there that would increase our total energy production without harming things too much, I’m guessing. If you put some type of turbine in an area that has significant title forces going on, and it can spin both ways. I think that would be significant.

MARLO

Anyway, so getting back to the space stuff.

STEVE

You could put up a solar ray in space and collect unfiltered solar energy.

MARLO

And then it’s always high noon in space, right? This idea was brought forward by Isaac Asomov, the science fiction writer, which I know you know every movie, right?

STEVE

Yep. Every movie.

MARLO

I forget the name of the book but he talked in this science fiction novel – about which I’m assuming was made into a movie at one time – about collecting energy from space and beaming it to earth. So this book was written in 1941. The book is named Reason by the way, in which a space station transmits energy collected from the sun to various planets using microwave beams. So between 1978 and 1986, the Congress authorized the Department of Energy and NASA to jointly investigate the concept.

Basically, cable that would be tethered to this huge solar array in space and that’s how they would get the electricity to earth. Now, moving forward, in 1999, NASA’s Space Solar Program, Exploratory Research and Technology program, where SERT was initiated, they are now looking at this very seriously. And they actually anticipate that space-powered energy being beamed back to the earth will have a significant impact in the 21st century. As far as our energy consumption goes up. They’re using a laser-guided system.

STEVE

Now think of it this way. It’s like how many science fiction movies have had a death ray?

MARLO

So that’s interesting with this, right? If that laser guided system is off by even the 10th of a degree, Chicago disappears. But it is, it’s interesting to see that this could potentially be a pretty big deal.

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