Hydrokinetics Is (or Was) a “Boy Thing”

When my son was a little boy, he loved to see speeding railroad trains and the huge earth-movers that operated in landfills.  My daughter preferred acting in skits with her little friends.  We see this stuff playing itself out wherever we look.

Included in the “boy thing” is hydrokinetics.  Speaking for myself, I’m enchanted by the idea of converting the kinetic energy of massive amounts of moving water into electricity.

It’s for that reason that I’m saddened that hydrokinetics is largely a relic of our clean energy past.  It’s not a “has been”; it’s a “never was.” By the time people were starting to make progress in terms of efficiency and reliability, the levelized cost of solar PV and wind came crashing down, dooming hydro to the domain of hobbyists and a few niche commercial applications.