celestialdancer 's List: Clean Energy Alternatives

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  A Cleaner Future aims to provoke, inspire, and provide information about alternative and renewable energy sources. We're not experts on what should be done, we're just concerned citizens that want there to be an earth for our children and many future generations to come.

   

  Its hard to live in this world without being a part of the petroleum process. Its easy to look at a catastrophe like the Gulf Oil Spill and demand immediate change.

   

  So what can we do? For starters, we can choose to no longer remain silent. We can ask questions, we can demand answers, and we can seek out the truth.

   

  These may sound like lofty ambitions, but at one point in time so was the idea of freedom to our forefathers.

   

  Thanks for stopping by and please get involved. We only have one world.

• A completely new concept of underwater wave energy using a simple 7 ton kite turbine design has been developed by Minesto; which is a spinoff from the Swedish military and aircraft design firm Saab. The Deep Green underwater turbine captures the power of the ocean just like a kite in wind.

   

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  The system could generate 18 terawatthours of energy annually, enough to provide nearly 4 million British households with reliably green electricity every year. UK households now use about a third of what average US households use in energy.

• Originally Saab was working on a kite design for a wind turbine, but found that the concept would actually work better in water, which is 832 times more dense than air.

   

  The kite twirls in a repeating figure eight pattern (video) that increases the ocean velocity ten-fold. The first stage increases the relative flow speed entering a turbine. When the tide hits the wing it turns down, which creates a lift force. The kite is mounted to the ocean bed with a tether and is controlled by a rudder to gently nudge it in the desired trajectory.
• Certainly because these are such extremely simple-tech structures they would be cost effective - costing less in materials per power produced, and costing less in transporting them to the site, in installing them and even in ongoing maintenance costs.

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• The Physalia is designed to travel between the major rivers of Europe, purifying the water and facilitating international water conservation research.

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