[azzleandre]

Reading the article raises an old question: When will we be able to retrieve the power from a hurricane? Let the thunderstorm occur and using the [YET-TO-INVENT]-technique, to power our civilization for... let's say a year.

[mechanical_fish]

The problem, as always, is energy storage. It's the real bottleneck. Batteries don't have a high energy density, they wear out quickly, they're heavy, and they cost a lot of energy and material to build.

If we could package up the energy coming out of some hurricane-powered turbines, store it up for a year, and ship it around the country cheaply... yeah, our energy worries would be a lot fewer. Especially if the same technology could be applied to solar grids in Arizona.

The problem with a hurricane, of course, is that you get a lot of energy but you get it all at once. You can store a lot of energy in a tree, but you can't turn a tree's worth of energy into a tree in five minutes. You'd rather that the energy trickle in over time, so that you have time to capture it.

[dflock]

Does anyone know - or know how to figure out - how much power is 'stored' at any given time in the globe's power transmission lines? Intuitively, this must be a pretty huge amount - basically 1x the global power consumption at any given instant? Anyone know if there's any/much spare capacity, that could actually be used as a massive distributed battery?