Truly Renewable Energy

[Khendraja'aro]

Since the thread has mostly lost it's seriousness, can I enquire about what was said about tidal energy in the original thread? That comes from our moon and gravity obviously and not-so-obviously where ever gravitational PE comes from but I am pretty sure that's entirely renewable, granted, until the suns blows up.

Well, it does sound promising - however, tidal power generation also has a rather large ecological impact on the area around it. For starters, the fish who get sucked into those definitely won't like it.

On the other hand, it's a highly dependable technology - the frequency of the tides is near-constant.

[Being]

Well, it does sound promising - however, tidal power generation also has a rather large ecological impact on the area around it. For starters, the fish who get sucked into those definitely won't like it.

On the other hand, it's a highly dependable technology - the frequency of the tides is near-constant.

If we suck the energy out of the tides on a massive scale it will change eco-systems in that region. And as we've witnessed in our own lifetime changing eco-systems causes other changes which might not be as beneficial as the energy we get from robbing energy from a system that had worked fine when left alone.

[Khendraja'aro]

If we suck the energy out of the tides on a massive scale it will change eco-systems in that region. And as we've witnessed in our own lifetime changing eco-systems causes other changes which might not be as beneficial as the energy we get from robbing energy from a system that had worked fine when left alone.

You really don't know how this whole "Physics" thing works, do you? What I see here is a massive amount of confusion on the meaning of physical terms.

[EyeKhan]

If we suck the energy out of the tides on a massive scale it will change eco-systems in that region. And as we've witnessed in our own lifetime changing eco-systems causes other changes which might not be as beneficial as the energy we get from robbing energy from a system that had worked fine when left alone.

I don't know about the tides, but I think there could be some issue with doing this to the wind. Wind turbines don't just ride on the wind, they remove energy to make electricity (and heat). And wind is a large component of weather. What happens to patterns of weather if we build enough wind turbines to remove, say, 10% of global wind energy? What about 20%? Weather will have to be to affected. The very basic and more or less unaddressed problem in all of this is we've become so numerious and so energy/resource hungry that whatever we do to meet those needs is going to affect the climate in one way or another.