{"id":820,"date":"2008-11-13T15:55:34","date_gmt":"2008-11-13T14:55:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/?p=820"},"modified":"2008-11-13T15:55:34","modified_gmt":"2008-11-13T14:55:34","slug":"energy-islands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/?p=820","title":{"rendered":"Energy islands"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It is one of those ideas that is so obvious it is difficult to imagine why somebody did not think of it sooner: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.livescience.com\/environment\/081112-pf-energy-islands.html\" target=\"_blank\">a floating rig<\/a> that collects wave, solar, thermal and wind energy.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>One of these hexagonally-shaped islands could generate 250 megawatts (enough power for a small city), Michaelis said. Even more power is possible by mooring together several Energy Islands into a small archipelago that could include greenhouses for food, a small harbor for ships and a hotel for tourists.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Although the focus is on using the other technologies to help ocean thermal energy conversion, I think the idea could have plenty of merit even without this. It won&#8217;t be cheap, at about $600m per energy island, but it could pay for itself through desalinisation or aquaculture.<\/p>\n<p>It would be important to ensure that such facilities do not interfere with marine life: with so many fish species already threatened, it would be stupid to run the risk of further depopulation (although I confess ignorance of fish stocks in tropical waters). There are also a great many dead zones in world waters, and I would be concerned that the pumping up of so many nutrients could create new ones; I&#8217;m sure such possibilities will be dealt with if such projects get funding.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s also unclear how far offshore these islands would be: too close, and public opinion will be against populating pretty sea views with technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It is one of those ideas that is so obvious it is difficult to imagine why somebody did not think of it sooner: a floating rig that collects wave, solar, thermal and wind energy. One of these hexagonally-shaped islands could generate 250 megawatts (enough power for a small city), Michaelis said. Even more power is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[35,36,63,66],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/820\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tinyplanetblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}