The Citadel: The World's First Floating Apartment Complex

we are just adapting to global warming. we need to invest into more of this and put them on the ocean.

The real big money will be converting all the existing expensive seaside resorts to float once the seas start to rise around them!

Big problem with global warming and floating houses -they floats away!

Holland needs to worry about being below sea level too, so this sort of thing is handy for land based dwellings :-)

No Sleepwalking allowed...............splash!

"but the sort of crazy that could actually work"

Holland perhaps, New Orleans not so much.

Wonder if anyone's looked at tidal power generation for this?

A vertical rack fixed to the sea-bed could engage with a pinion on the appt. complex, geared up to turn an alternator as the tide rises & falls

Thoughts, anyone?

Wouldn't any resistance to the tide pushing the house up result in it flooding ? I guess it depend upon how buoyant the things are. Maybe they could have great big polystyrene basements.

The housing is to be built in polards, so maybe they could just stick a turbine in whatever sluice they use to control water level. Trouble with that is the tidal range probably isn't very much.

That all sounds a bit flippant, but it wasn't - honest ! The idea of getting energy from floating houses is cool, I'm sure that some quick calculations could be done with mass/height......

This link is a bit better than in the OP.

If there's little or no tidal range, my cunning plan is dead (in or out of the water ).

Could work in other places (with a decent tidal range), tho', maybe. As for flooding it by the resistance of the generator gear, I imagine this thing must have a displacement something like a battleship - and they take a bit of sinking!

Maybe it's not too late to suggest alternatives for the Severn Barrier

Some of the pictures of the housing look a bit like wooden huts on top of Mulberry harbours. Either way, them polders won't see much uppy-downy movement.

OK, the Belfast is still moored down on the Thames. Tide tables are probably easy to find.....go on, I dares you do work out the potential energy . I'd do it, but I'm off clubbin'

Maybe I'll do sum somes over the weekend.

Thought for a bit you were off clubbin'

....I could be tempted by a G&T on the veranda right now

HMS Belfast: 11,553 Tons = 11,737,848 kg

Tidal range at London Bridge ≈ 5 m

PE = M * g * h = 575,154,552 J ≈ 160 kWh

Two tides per day, and what goes down must have gone up, so that's 640 kWh.

No idea how efficiently it could be converted, but it's a fairly tidy sum for starters - not as much as I'd expected, tho' .

Anyone see any mistakes?

The calculations look good to me, though I still can't get my head around how you could extract the same energy going up as down.

If we used 3KWh per person, it looks like HMS Belfast could make for a nice little eco-village. Level it above the main deck, put up some yuppies style apartments....just for argument sake use 320 KWh/day......efficiency of recovery quite high, say 80% → 250 KWh/day......consumption of 3KWh/day for greeny peoples......about 80 yuppies on an area of about 180m x 20m...Yeah, I reckon it works. Shame to lose the Belfast, so.......

....lets solve the MP's housing issue here ! Nice hulk moored off Westminster, fully fitted apartments owned by Parliament and made available to our glorious representatives. Bye bye endless cheques for non-mortgages/toasters/duck houses.

" ... I still can't get my head around how you could extract the same energy going up as down ... "

Displacement, innit? Archimedes annat. The moon's doing the hard bit.

Yeah, but if you hook up a great big ratchet to harvest the upward movements energy, it's like adding more weight to the boat. The ratchet/generator will offer resistance to movement. If you experiment by putting weights on the float in your toilet cistern it will overflow because the float wont float (!). You can reap almost all the PE as the boat drops down, but not on the way up.

Now I'm very confused, and I'm going to cry . OK, you can harvest the buoyancy force on the way up, and the weight of the boat on the way down. The two are different, yes ? Please tell me 'yes', else I'll scweam and scweam !

SCWEAM !! Is HMS Belfast a boat or a ship ? You can usually tell by the windows, but I can't remember what it looks like.

"The two are different, yes ?"

Yes. Different, but the same .

Here she is:

Boat or ship? I dunno. Can't see the windows very well.

I was being silly - RN call submarines 'boats'

Went on board her once, but it was a very long time ago.

Well now... Thats not a half bad idea to implement into this sort of thing.

Great idea, but for me, I live a few miles inland in a low elevation area of south Mississippi. When the water rises, my property will become waterfront property and worth more money.

That's OK for a while - longer if you're on the side of a hill - but don't get too settled!