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by Schroedingersat 1346 days ago
If you're letting the ocean move it, it's generally known as tidal or wave power. It's appealing because it's very predictable and the variability is not correlated* with wind or solar. Afaik cost and placement of suitable sites is a dealbreaker.

One potential technogy https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-31/wave-power-generator-...

New thing I just learned. The tidal stream industry seem confident they can beat nuclear at shockingly low investment. https://interregtiger.com/understanding-tidal-stream-energy/

If they're not lying, that's your high return investment for the future (if you're a policy maker...if you are a private investor then what happened to the solar industry when panels got cheap could happen again).

* uncorrellated variable sources need less storage when combined There are already regions that can work on wind, solar, and a small percentage of existing hydro with no storage for this reason. Tidal isn't completely uncorrelated -- roughly once a month your peaks will line up with solar peak production, and the trough will line up with peak demand for a few days -- but attaching two systems at distance will help with this and it reduces the load on hydro.