If Hydrokinetics Is Going To Work, It Won’t Look Like This

Like wind turbines, devices intended to extract kinetic energy out of moving water are limited in their generation capacity by their “swept area,” i.e. the area of the imaginary circle made by tips of the blades.  For that reason, what you see here doesn’t look too appealing.  On top of poor cost-effectiveness per KWh, let’s add debris, biofouling, corrosion, collisions with recreational and cargo boats, tangling of fishing nets and lines, and damage to marine life and habitats.

I’m aware that most of my posts on fledgling concepts in clean energy are negative.  I think that’s a function of the fact that there really aren’t that many good ideas out there, and most of them are already under development.

Fortunately for our planet and the quality of life we’ll be leaving to our descendants, we don’t need lots of ideas; we need lots of horsepower in vigorous R&D and deployment of solid concepts.