Ocean Current Hydrokinetics and Global Climate Change

Here’s a video on ocean current/tidal hydrokinetics that I don’t claim to understand fully.  It’s very professionally made, it comes from Siemens, one of the top five players in the industrial energy space, and its spokesperson is a kindly older “professorial” type of fellow (Peter Fraenkel — pictured here) with all kinds of credibility.

But does it have to be so short on meaningful content?  OK, it wasn’t made for scientists, but aren’t even garden-variety humanoids interested in things like:

• Can this be cost-effective?

• What are the challenges?

• What are the fantasies?  I.e., in a perfect world, how much energy can we get, and what is the real potential to offset our consumption of fossil fuels?

Maybe that last one’s not a bad question to ask on the very week that the concentration of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere just crossed 400 parts per million.