Floating Offshore Wind Power Grid

In the sea the speed of winds is more and constant. Offshore wind power harnesses this by placing wind towers a few kilometres away from the coast. Now major portion of the earth is ocean ,70% of it. However these offshore wind towers can only be setup in areas where the sea or ocean is relatively shallow since only a certain height can be given to the wind towers. The base of the wind towers is on the seabed.

     However a new kind of off shore wind tower . This tower is actually a floating tower in the sea, so it is possible to set it up anywhere in the ocean. This brings major portion of the earth as a potential area of generation of wind power. In the past I have discussed many other wind power generation technologies in this blog. This one is equally exiting and promising . There is an excellent Wikipedia page on this floating Wind turbines .

The motivation behind writing this blog came from a NHK world programme I stumbled on today in which they showed this and described to potential for Japan to harness this energy . Japan does have very little shallow sea in its coastal areas so this technology is a boon for them and they estimate that Japan can generate many times more energy from this floating wind power stations as compared to solar power in that country. 

What other possible other applications of this floating wind power stations : one wild thing that comes to mind is that today Fuel Oil which is extracted from Crude Oil power most of the ships today. So if we can possibly have a chain of such floating power stations across the oceans of the world maybe our ships can draw energy from them and run on green electric power rather than the pollution causing fuel oil. This possibility deserves to be looked into although implementing this idea on such a large scale would be a huge challenge.

Also US Navy has come out with a technology which extracts CO2 and hydrogen from seawater and uses it as a fuel .