Can oceans power the world?

on something. Nobody push his record, Like Maddie, one of my friends has um finger tips, just the fingertips that look very much like big toes all across and um, they're big. He has big, huge fingertips. Is is what you like? The finger is just narrow and then it balloons up at the end really freakishly. So he'd be a good bass player, I would think, maybe, So I'll

ask him you should do that, Chuck. Do you remember we have talked about capturing enter g right, because energy can neither be created nor destroyed, It can only be captured. We talked about several ways to do this. Yes, well, one of the ways we talked about, um was by putting basically what amount to wind turbines underwater, and there was a we did under water turbines. Yeah, sure we did, right,

I think so it's hard to tell these days. Well, if we didn't, that's good because we're going to cover that again in this podcast. I think we did because we talked about Verdant technology and they were the ones who put some in the Hudson, didn't we East River? Yes? Sure? Okay, so, um they put some into two thousand and six. It was, you know, to to wide acclaim. This is a huge project. They were gonna just power large parts of New York

with this technology. And they went back to check on them and they found that, um, all but two of their wind turbines were just completely in shambles. It's one of the great challenges in underwater energy production BINGO. I

have updates on them. We'll get to that later though. Okay, luckily for us, right, because the the ocean and well bodies of water are this huge untapped resource, well mostly untapped resource of energy, there are other ways to capture energy from the ocean, right, which is what we're going to talk about today. Let's do it, and let's start with the French, because apparently they've long known they're all

over it. Yeah, we like all of the major innovations that we're pursuing right now came from the French over the last couple of centuries, right who knew, Well, we should just mention the history in in uh long time ago, a frenchy and his son who I could not find their names. I couldn't either, but they had a pretty cool idea. They attached a big lever to the side of their boat, and when the ocean moved up and down, the lever moved up and down, which could potentially power

pumps and saws and things like that. Right, and let's cat showing the mechanical energy of wave motion. Very good sense. But unfortunately, well or maybe fortunately, the steam engine came along kind of rendered that. Unfortunately for him, his idea was rendered moot. But thanks to the rest of us, because steam energy turned out to be a pretty cool

thing the steam engine did. About a hundred years after that, another Frenchman used heat energy from the ocean to generate power, but it was not very cost effective, so that died as well. And then uh nineteen sixty six there was

finally some success once again in France. In Britain, Yeah, and the on the Ross River and uh, it still operates today, and it is actually, from what I can tell, that the biggest success, right, that's yeah, and it's because it's actually generating electricity quite a bit, two D forty megawatts, which is uh about that's better than a wind farm

and that's yeah that typical. Not quite as good as a coal fire power plant, but um it is better than a typic coal wind farm, and um it is far and away I think the most successful UH Ocean Energy UM outfit running right now. Right. Yeah, well that's on the river though, was it. Yeah, So it's capturing the energy of the tide. There's also you can you can capture the energy of the heat differential, right, and

you can capture the mechanical energy right with ways. There's three ways, three at least, yeah, yeah, exactly right, because there's also the currents underwater turbines. It's four, I mean, the ways to capture energy. Right, let's talk about ways. This one is my favorite because there's so much to it. Right, there's mechanical energy that can be captured, kinetic energy that can be converted into useful mechanical energy. Basically, what you do is you want to power somehow power turbine or

a piston to create electric city from a generator. Right. Yeah, and waves move thanks to the wind, create big crest and troughs. And at one point someone looked at those and said, hey, that's pretty consistent. I bet we could capture that. Um. It is very consistent, is very predictable, right, Um. Waves are found all over the place, so they actually can bring energy from other parts of the globe to you, to you, top of the muffin, to you. Uh and um, let's talk about how a wave comes up. Did you

read this? No, because you're the expert. You're the wave expert. All right. So waves are the result of a transfer of solar energy to the water, to the ocean. Okay, so did you know that wind is really just a creation of solar energy, solar radiation, solar heat, and that ends up driving the wave. Yes, But it's interesting how it starts with the sun. It does. It does start

with the sun, Chuck, thanks for that segue. Um, this sun does not heat the earth evenly, right, right, So there's different pockets of air, surface air that are heated more quickly than others. They rise, okay, and as they rise, the colder air rushes in and the movement of the colder air to fill in the space left by the

warmer air. That's wind. That's wind. That's awesome. Okay. So when this, when this water, when the ocean is pushed by wind enough, long enough, hard enough, fast enough for far enough distances, waves pick up, right, And that that gives even more traction to the wind. So the waves just get bigger and bigger. That's why a good storm will produce bigger waves. Right. But what you have is kinetic energy pushing the water into waves, and that kinetic

energy becomes stored in the wave. Right. So the wave isn't a bunch of moving water. The water actually, as this kinetic energy rolls over, it acts as a conveyor belt, so it moves in a scular motion and delivers this big dent amount of kinetic energy to you to capture if you have a wave converter. Uh, handy, exactly, dude, Very nice explanation, was it? Yeah? Thanks man? I think so. It's been a little while since I got one. Right.

Shall we talk about tides now? Yes, much to the chagrin of Bill O'Reilly, we do know what causes tide. I'm glad you meant did you see that? Bill O'Reilly didn't know that the pull of the moon, the gravitational force of the moon, is what creates tides. What's crazy is that the atheist was like, well, we don't know, but still he was a little flustered. I can he was flustered, but a real opportunity to be like everybody that saw that was on the edge of their seats saying,

say it the moon, and the guy was like, yeah, well. Unfortunately, no steps in there to correct him. I haven't heard a response from him either. I'm curious who Bill O'Reilly. Yeah, I don't think he's going to come out and address it. At this point, he already looked dumb enough. He didn't care. Okay, so uh, for those of you don't know what you're

talking about quickly. Bill O'Reilly was interviewing the head of the Atheists of America and said, he explains God by the fact that no one can explain what causes tides. The tides go out, tides come in every day, and we can't explain it, and no one knows why. I think is what he said. So anyway, it is in fact caused by the gravitational pull of the moon. Mr O'Reilly and Uh. The cool thing about tides is there

everywhere along the coast. They all coastal areas experienced too high tides and two low tides every day and they're pretty much on the button. The unfortunate thing is there's only about forty places around the Earth where you can generate electricity from this because the difference between high and low tide has to be at least sixteen feet and that doesn't happen everywhere. So there's like forty sites around

the world that are suitable. Forty sites and the Bay of Fundy I don't think we mentioned yet that is where they're actually doing this, and it's it's a great place. Yeah, it's um a narrow inlet and has the highest tides in the world fifty feet in a very short cycle, so in six hours they can produce a hundred and ten billion tons of seawater flow in and out. Yeah, that's a lot. Again it is. So that's yeah, and

they're they're actually generating power there that Fundy. But what's crazy is that that when we talked about in Britain France um two forty megawatts the Bay of fundy with that enormous transfer of seawater in and out still only generates a twenty megawatt um power twenty megawatts of power, twenty megawatt power just one. So one way they can

do this, Josh, is with uh, like rivers with a dam. Right, they can build a title dam essentially and it operates kind of in the same way, which is how buddy, they don't know if we need to explain that gates open up. It's called a beverage or is it a beverage or barrage barage and the tides Uh. When there's an adequate difference in the level of water on the oposite side of the dam, the gate opens and allows water to flow in across the turbine spinds. The turbine

creates h electricity via generator. Right, So anytime you're talking about wave action or the movement of water, UH, there's going to be some sort of turbine or piston involved because that's all you need and it's going to generate electricity. It still blows me away that that's possible. Yeah, but it's so simple too. We just have to figure out how to do it more efficiently and then you know, we'll be able to come up with this nice grab

bag of energy providers. It's right. Yeah, ocean tides Josh into title currents is another way. Yeah, what are title currents? Well, title currents are well what bring in the tides? Are the currents that are created by the tides coming in and out. Right. The problem with the title currents is that they're not constant. Like you said, they happen twice a day in and out each twice a day, right, too high, too low. So you've got four tidal currents. If you're set up to um generate power as it's

going in and out, well, how would you do that? Though? Underwater turbines it's basically like a wind underwater wind farm. I didn't realize that, like sixty six foot propellers underwater spinning. But that's what they put. Was it the East River? That's what they put in New York? They had these in there. Still, Yeah, well at least two more than that. We'll get to that. It's it's paying off finally, So Chuck,

that's that's electrical. As as we said electrical, there's going to be some sort of turbine or piston that is moved up and down by the the either the well the movement of water, whether it's waves, currents, tides, whatever. But then there's also um thermal energy big time. You want the stat Yeah, the ocean, the sun provides the equivalent of two hundred and fifty billion barrels of oil per day. Yeah in the ocean. Yeah, that's that's a lot. Yeah,

that's a lot. More sits out there and collects all this heat from the ocean. I think in the unit in the US we use twenty one million barrels of oil a day. And this is now the problem is is like that's across the entire ocean, that's across the Earth's surface. We we don't know how to do that. We're still working with full of vite ex cels, like how does this work? How do we make this happen?

So that's that's as much as we could ever possibly capture, right, but still even if we get a significant portion of that and can convert it into energy, we're on easy Street. Explain, Oh tech is ocean thermal energy conversion? Right? Yeah, that's how they do it, and there's a couple of ways to do it. There's a closed system there's an open system, and there's a hybrid system, which is open and closed

system mixed together. So with a closed system, um, you usually you take some sort of low boiling point liquid like ammonia, which has a boiling point of like negative twenty eight degrees fahrenheit, right, which I don't understand how windex works. Then that's something I think we need to look up index works. Yeah, has ammonia in it? Right? How is it kept liquid? Because I can tell you my the the area under my sink is warmer than

negative twenty degrees fahrenheit. Yeah, I mean, but there's bottles of ammonia to just playing ammonia. Right. I guess Bill O'Reilly was right, Chuck. Um. So in a close in a closed system, you take ammonia, um, you expose it to sea water warmer seawater, right, uh, and it immediately vaporizes into gas. As that gas expands, it pushes a turbine.

There's another turbine, right, It's like a steam engine. Wood powers a generator, and then the gas has moved into another chamber where it encounters co old sea water and converts back into liquid, and it's pumped back into the original chamber again. See I love systems like this where it's just a loop. Stuff becomes vapor, then it goes back to what it was, then it becomes vapor again.

Seems real efficient, closed system, right yes, yes, And then there's the open system, right yeah, And that's a little bit of a different principle. It's warm surface water, but he's a vacuum chamber. They move all the air and because of magic, when you do this, the seawater boils. Is that insane clown posse? I think so? So it actually boils and that produces steam, like pure water steam,

and then that can drive the turbine. And then just like with the ammonia, you pump cold sea water back in cools, the steam changes it back into water and back again back again. The cool part about this is they can create fresh water as sort of a byproduct, which is awesome. That's huge desalienation is they've had a lot of t auble doing that successfully in a large scale right right. Um we talked about that in manufacturing

water and some of the other ones. Um. But yeah, if you if you create the steam out of sea water, they found that it's almost pure water, pure freshwater. No salt and you can drink that. So yeah, they're trying to figure out how to use open cycle systems and the hybrid system, which, like I said, combines closed in open systems. Um, but both the hybrid and the open

create fresh water. And I think they figured out that a single too megawatt oh tech plant, either open or hybrid, could produce cubic meters of desalinated water every day, which is that I can't drink that much. Yeah, you can drink that much coffee. I do, which is why I spill it right now. Unfortunately, otech systems aren't producing a lot of electricity, but they think that the potential there is pretty great. Other people are investing in that at

this point. Yeah, that seems to be the one that's attracting the most investment dollars right now. I wonder why, uh, what do you mean why people are going that way? Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's the most efficient, cost effective way at this point, who knows. I think it's actually the most expensive, to tell you the truth. Really, I mean it's not the most efficient it maybe it's true,

but it's it's the most expensive. I think. Well, right now, what's going on is there's a lot of research and development happening and all these fields because they think the ocean is really where it's at. We talked about Verdant Power. UM, here's a little update on their system. They are in phase three right now. They, like you said, they had some problems in the demonstration phase because marine environments are pretty rough on everything. Just ask anyone who like lives

on the beach with a car. Some fishes like I'm swimming here. That's true. We'll get to that as controversial. UH talked about it before, but yeah, that's true. In the demonstration period though, they did produced a free flow system. They produced elect They called it excellent hydrodynamic, mechanical and electrical performance grid connect the power with no quality problems, fully by directional, continuous unattended operation. So they don't even

have some dude down there right. I wonder how it's that job would pay exactly. In the end, they produced seventy megawatt hours of energy to two end users and UM right now, they applied for a permit basically in just a couple of months ago. Last month in December, they applied for a permit to make it real, and they're waiting on. All of that was just they just

wrote that story down there, like now let's make this real. Well, they want to do it, you know, in earnest and not just demonstrate, and they think they're at that point now. So they're waiting on I think right now they're waiting on New York City to say, take over the East River or this portion of it and do it so to megawatts uh, seventy megawatt hours of energy families to two end users. I don't think they were families. I think they were probably power plants or something. Ohh gotcha,

Yeah are you sure? No, I'm not because then user could also be like some guy with a hot plate and he's like, hey, I'm my hot plates working just fine. The UK is is who is leading title turbine research right now, though, So hats off to you, is it the UK? I thought this has something? Well, no, they're they're all dabbling in its Spain in Portugal, but the UK is currently ahead of the game in in this kind of stuff so far. Wow. Well, yeah, that's off

for sure. And yeah they took the mantle from the French and ran with it, right The French are like, it's two accents for me to zero for you today. That's a switch. So why is this good? Why are we doing this? What are the environmental advantages? Well, one of the things we said was the um with wave energy. Right, I didn't give you a stat that's going to blow

your mind. Wave energy alone, right, the kinnectic energy found in the motion on the ocean, right could point zero two percent of that, right, could power the entire planet. Point zero two I'm sorry, point of the energy, and ocean waves could power the entire But still it's pretty impressive point to, not two point anything point to. So what you're saying is we just need to be able to harness a very tiny percentage. Yes. Plus also the good thing, the good thing about waves, which is why

I throw my weight behind it. As compared to a wind farm, right, Um, you've got three times the density, right, so conceivably moving it about the same rate as as you know, wind five knots or something like that, you would have three times the amount of energy capable of being captured and transferred into usable electricity. Yeah, it says a current, a water current, ocean current running five miles an hour can turn a tidal turbine thirty revolutions per minute,

and that is very much more than the wind. Well, just and don't forget. I mean we're talking about turbines that are propellers that are sixty ft across each. I mean that's a lot, yes, thirty times a minute, it's like almost once every few seconds. Uh. They also run silent and run deep. So a lot of people complain about the noise of wind farms, the buzzing, the buzzing, the constant buzzing, the aerodynamics noise, and you know they're

underwater so you don't see it. Is. The funny thing is that's such a like a human centric way of looking at it, like, oh, it doesn't make any noise because we're above water, right, who cares about what it sounds like below water? Surely placing these things in the ocean are going to have like a huge impact, right well, and that's the downside. Might as well get to that. You can't you can't just throw these things in the

ocean and have no impact on marine life. Gonna kill some fish, definitely disrupt some some spawning patterns will take Like an otech system, right, a closed otech system, if say it's battered about by a particularly bad typhoon, that closed system may not be closed any longer, and you've got a massive ammonia spill in a local area in the ocean, and yeah, that's gonna kill some fish, right. Um, same with any grease that you might need to keep

a piston moving properly. There's just there's a lot of factors involved. But conceivably, I'm I'm pretty sure you could do a um what are those called that that risk assessment people do, like a cost benefit analysis versus say something like a power plant UH is spewing out right? How how much couldn't you compare that pretty easily? I think? And I wonder if if the impact would be much less severe on ocean environment than right above ground. Well,

there's going to be an impact. You can't create electricity without some sort of impact on something in the environments, like making so exactly got to break a few eggs. So I think the ideal is to find the minimal impact with the maximum payoff. Right now, it is not ocean UH power because it's still heavily in the R

and D phase, which means it's expensive. But as the kinks get worked out, like the solar panels were, I mean they're still expensive, but they were way more expensive twenty years ago because they didn't work right all the time and you had to put more money into making them work right. But once you get the kinks worked out, it becomes a little more efficient, little cheaper. So maybe

it'll it'll close that gap a bit. Yeah, my my money and I think we should talk about why tides, title damns barages don't are have are problematic problem because they kind of captured my attention, like I was thinking, well, yeah, it's build some hydro electric electric damns these forty sites

and that will help tremendously. Sure. Part of the problem is the whole point of um title movement in a bay, or one of the benefits of it, UH is to filter out impurities, silt, crud, dead crayfish, all that stuff sucked out and you know turned into food or you know filtered into the rest of the ocean. Right If you have a damn there, that's that's UH making that more difficult or preventing that. In some cases, the local environment around that bay suffers because the water purity plummets.

My money's on wave converter wave energy converters like Salter's duck. Plus we found out that damns on the earth can potentially cause earthquakes. Wonder I mean, I wonder if we could have an effect under the seafloor as well. Yeah, learn the hard way sometimes, we definitely do. Actually that's

the only way humans learned. Chuck. Yeah, agreed. Well, if you want to learn more about Salter's duck, this a sterious thing I've just now mentioned, I would recommend you type that in S A L T E R apostrophe s in the handy search bar How stuff works dot Com. Also required reading for this one is wave energy type that in and ocean power. That'll just bring up everything right there. Read those three, and uh, listen to this podcast and just start spewing out information whenever somebody's like,

I love oil, Yeah for coal? Yeah, you know, we need to do a show on his mountaintop removal coal mining. Have you heard of that? Yeah, that's that's tough stuff that makes releasing lubricants into the ocean through an o tech system look like nothing exactly. Yeah. Alright, well, yeah, I said handy search bar already, right, listener, mail Josh, I'm gonna call this one of a hundred or more ocular migraine emails. I would say at least the hundred. We've heard from a lot of people who suffer from

the ease, and we came We've got the idea. Right. I want to say to everyone that I'm sorry you have to deal with this stuff. But I picked out one from David in the UK because I like a UK Did that have a funny accent? It did? Hey, guys, just listen to the migraine podcast. I'm responding to your call. I was first diagnosed with migraines at fourteen. I'm now

forty seven. When I had an extreme port of of dizziness at fourteen, it made me nauseous, preventing me from standing because the room was spinning, preventing my eyes from remaining still if I look to the right jittered. I've not had a particular episode like this since, but the migraine symptoms have changed over the years. Up to the early twenties, I would get tunnel vision. I could only see what was directly what I was directly looking at

about fifteen percent of my vision. The rest was all swirly. Imagine looking through a scene through two highly polished steel tubes. From then on, it was the opposite. The subject I was looking at would disappear, but the outer part was clear. Imagine looking at some twenty ft away, but look directly at their face. Their head disappeared. Peculiar thing. I think that's peculiar enough. The peculiar thing is that it didn't look odd until I thought about it. Somewhat like a

blind spot test. Yeah, blind spots are very um common, so well, sure they're just concerued. Uh. There's a very mild headache following an episode, similar to eyestrain, and sometimes a feeling which I can only describe as an empty space in my head that feels as though it should have a sign saying headache to be erected here soon.

That's not age, that's not touch wood, guys. I have not had an episode in waking hours for about four years now, and notice no more morning symptoms, which I attribute to being on permanent statin medication for high cholesterol. You know, here in America we don't touch wood. We not. So that's from David in the UK. And uh, for everyone suffering from ocular migraines, I'm so right, yes, same,

it sounds awful. He talked about um his eyes when he looked to the right, his eyes trembling back and forth. Do you remember that actor whose whose eyes like went back and forth all the time. He was in h what's the one with John Cusack where there's a murder John Cusack? Ray Leota say anything? Oh the hotel thing? Yeah, yeah, that was awful. What was the name of the movie though, Oh I can't remember. Well, he played the guy, like the bad guy in that one. But he was also

in a movie with Mickey Rourke. His eyes twitchy. Yeah, that's just like what the actor was known for. Like, they just moved back and forth in a really weird way. So if you can tell me what movie that that guy appeared with with Mickey Rourke? All right, yeah, I want to hear Okay, right, I think we should. Well, we can't do contests anymore, can't we. You know, actors always list have you ever seen a head shot? They

always list on the back their special things they can do. Yeah, this is always like horseback riding, BURPONCM man accents and this guy head high twitch right, it's crazy. I can't believe you haven't seen it. I probably haven't just didn't notice it or something. Well, if you can tell me what movie he was in with Mickey work. I want to hear it. Wrap it up in an email and send it to stuff Podcasts at how stuff works dot com. For moral on this and thousands of other topics. Is

that how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The how Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you