Taming Sandy: Less Destructive & Generate Electricity From Her

Mother Nature is laughing.

Shift some decimal points left/right a few places, and things might get into the ballpark.

Mother Nature is laughing.

I am laughing.

In 1976, we had tropical storm "Kathleen", and the water came down the Jucumba mountains from the storm into the small town of Ocotilla, California with such force that it simply washed away several miles of Interstate 8 freeway, as well as freeway overpasses. The San Diego & Arizona Eastern Railroad was abandoned following the storm due to vast sections being washed out, including trestles, sustaining $1.27 million dollars in damage. The town of Ocotilla was washed away and buried in sand. Railroad tracks were bent in the shape of pretzels, and scattered about. In surveying the damage, I was awestruck, and the damages that it produced were burned into my memory to this day.

I can't imagine how anyone could possibly have "engineered or designed" anything that could have withstood the forces of nature that were unleashed by this storm.

After viewing the total and complete destruction in the storms path, all I can say is, "don't mess with mother nature". She is in charge.

It's like trying to tame lightning - you have a lot of energy for a short time, but most of the time nothing. You need a steady energy source to make it cost effective.

Interesting choice of analogy.

Harnessing power from lightening has been discussed here at CR4 before.

plus a way to store the energy to release controllably later. After all, in a major storm, you have large sections of your demand go dark so unless the trunk lines to other areas are still intact, there is no need for the "extra" energy.

Now as to the device, are we talking about a 4 km diameter wind turbine mounted on a boat travelling in the eye of the hurricane, or a wave collection system bouncing around in the storm surge on a 50-100 km front or a multi-thousand ton thermocouple system to soak up heat energy to starve the storm?

Some people have tried to produce electricity from the temperature difference you find between the ocean's surface water and the water at depth. It is not clear if they succeeded. I believe it was in Hawaii.

This would be a way to remove some power from the storm and convert it with a feasible infrastructure that doesn't necessarily have to be placed in the storm's path.

If you can cool down the surface water on a meaningful area, you will reduce the storm strength.

< It is not clear if they succeeded. >

More on this here

Generating electricity from the ocean's temperature gradient is clearly feasible.

However, I doubt that this could perturb future hurricanes due to scalability. So much warm water on the surface has to be pumped to even make a dent on the overall temperature simply because of the vast volume of ocean water.

GA for you too!

While one plant will not make any difference, a million of them may....

I don't think it will ever reach that level but this technology is a lot more feasible than trying to catch the storm's winds or lightening strikes...

OTEC has also many "symbiosis" applications that can make it a feasible option.

1-Production of fresh water

2-Production of electricity (of course).

3-The large flow of deep water can be used for fish farming. If enough flow is used, it would reduce the farm pollution problem by dilution.

4-Could be used to help the Gulf stream current to bring cold water to the surface.

5-Probably a better neighbor than wind farms or solar farms. Less noise, smaller footprint.

5-Certainly more reliable than wind farms or solar as the storage is built-in in the ocean...

We could probably combine OTEC with solar and wave movement to increase the gain of energy at lower cost than independent technologies. Symbiosis in technologies is the only way we will succeed in competing with oil with the "clean" energy sources.

I.e. One could build these large black floaters that wold use the waves actions to pump the surface water to the OTEC plant.

The surface water could get a few degrees of temperature gain when circulating in the above mentioned floaters.

This would cut on the pumping energy and increase the production. Even if not all the surface water is pumped that way, pumping water is a better use of the wave energy than trying to make electricity out of it. Similarly, the solar gain can be achieve at minimal cost because very little material is needed to take advantage of it.

The floaters to capture the waves could even be used to hold seaweed or oysters farms with minimal reduction of efficiency and take advantage of the infrastructure.

Similarly, the people caring for the farm would also maintain the floating system for little extra cost.

I am going to start a new thread on this. It is worth to have many people thinking about it.

An alternate posing of your question is in this "learning" page, which is from this website for Gulf of Maine Research Institute. A more detailed analysis of energy in storm related phenomena is in this paper.

As you mention, the energy is heat-derived, but converted, largely, to air circulation as it manifests into a hurricane. "Robbing" (or tapping, for this discussion) the heat would possibly prevent or allow some some control of the development cycle. But once it is formed, the most probably "available" energy is in the wind speeds. The question would be where do you get a heatsink large enough to do that?

Tapping the wind power... as long as we're being crazy/impractical/fantasizing, how about a large fleet (millions, or more... we're still dreaming right?) of self-contained buoys, with a chargeable battery at the base (planning that the weight would help stabilize it in high winds) and a wind generator (with prop. turned normal to the sea surface, not like a windmill, which is perpendicular to the wind direction) to charge the battery. Then harvesting the battery energy to be transferred into a larger storage facility. Crazy? Well, you encouraged that. Efficient? No. Doable? Unlikely. Actually, it wouldn't require hurricane winds to harvest energy in this way. So these buoys could operate continuously.

Toying more with the flotilla idea, how about a flotilla of heat-sinks (aluminum, most likely) which would change the amount of heat needed to have it converted into air circulation? I guess that could go either way -- either lessening the chance of spawning a storm, or possibly, making it worse, somehow.

Another heatsink idea would be to make them long enough to transfer the surface temperature rise to a depth where the ocean would be the "dump" for the heat. It would tend to raise the temperature at that depth which would, no doubt have some consequence. Whether it would be benign or not, who knows? There are sea current models and analysis. It would not provide any tapping of the energy, but might alter the development of storms. (Weather control, anyone? That's been flirted with on CR4, too.) Or, suppose we dump a bunch of aluminum soda cans (used) where the SST is indicating air circulation beginning to form. The air inside each can would be heated, mostly by water temperature and the small opening would, possibly, act like a "governor" of the release of the heated air inside. Really?? Heck, I don't know. Just more off the top of the head stuff. Plus, so many would probably sink that it would pollute the ocean with aluminum cans, possibly becoming a hazard like mercury in fish has become. (I seem to remember posting this link about mercury before, but here it is again.)

These would be my "starter" ideas on the quick. I keep a 20ft. pole handy for such musings.

Nice pun that we should brain"storm."

As absurd as your question seems on the surface (vague pun noted, but not intended), I would bet that the same people who were responsible for "staring at goats" don't find any topic or question of this sort to be too outlandish. They are paid (??) to be dreamers and fantasize. (Star Wars Missile Defense System, for instance?)

From time to time I hear the suggestion that we use a nuke to increase the pressure at the eye of a hurricane thereby stopping it in its tracks. The key to any explanation of the fruitlessness of this endeavor is the huge amount of energy in these storms. Even a large bomb is small compared to a hurricane. (From NOAA: Why don't we try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them?)

While there is plenty of energy for the taking, there's no way to take enough to affect the intensity of the storm.

Imagine that everyone in northern New Jersey, Long Island and New York City held a pole with a 1 meter square sail up in the air in an attempt to slow the winds of Sandy. Mind you, that's a few tens of millions of people. It still wouldn't have any appreciable effect on Sandy's winds. Again, the amount of energy involved is staggering, hard to conceive, astronomical... need I go on?

Sure you may be able to harness and store some energy. Just not enough to make a difference to the folks in the hurricane's path.

If one can generate electricity from Sandy that's great.