Helping Hand for Hydrokinetics

Those keeping track of the development of hydrokinetics (including tidal, ocean current, wave energy, etc.) will be interested to know that the U.S. Department of Energy is shelling out $7.4 million to encourage R&D in this space.

As long as we’re talking about seven figures, it’s hard to imagine that any taxpayer could be too upset; for example, that figure is about 1/100,000th of the military budget. Having said that, this is a good example of a certain consequence of the maturity and scale of solar PV and wind energy, i.e., that is tends to make other clean energy technologies noncompetitive.