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hunter

(38,263 posts)
15. Soon to be scrap metal, sunk, or washed up on a beach somewhere.
Sat Feb 28, 2015, 01:50 PM
Feb 2015

The ocean has no respect for the follies of man.

The nice thing about solar is that the plant can be maintained, and often repaired, by a couple of guys driving golf carts, and air is not nearly so hostile to machinery as ocean water is.

I recognize that Carnegie Wave Energy is doing this on Garden Island because marine engineering facilities are close at hand, and that the final product would be used in places where solar might not be such an obvious solution. But even wind turbines seem much less a maintenance nightmare per kilowatt hour delivered than these wave machines.

We need to stop pinning our hopes on future technologies. The fires of environmental catastrophe are raging all around us today and the only way back is to reduce our population and rethink what "economic productivity" really is. Our current measures of economic productivity are directly proportional to the damage we are doing to earth's environment. That isn't any sort of "productivity" at all.



Latest Discussions»Issue Forums»Environment & Energy»World’s first grid-connec...»Reply #15