posted 15 years ago
Welcome to the form!
I'm not sure there will be many big investors here, for projects like you describe. Permaculture sometimes espouses an effort of small, slow solutions.
Do you think there is the potential for community-scale ocean turbines? Or would it be mostly wave energy?
I'm a little skeptical of a 40 degree temperature difference as the prime mover for anything. Carnot efficiency on that sort of system is less than 14%, and that's an absolute ceiling that engineering, manufacturing, and the limits of materials/fluids rarely allow you to approach. But cold ocean water is a great way to air-condition a home, to cool a server farm, or to dump the heat from most other industrial processes.
"the qualities of these bacteria, like the heat of the sun, electricity, or the qualities of metals, are part of the storehouse of knowledge of all men. They are manifestations of the laws of nature, free to all men and reserved exclusively to none." SCOTUS, Funk Bros. Seed Co. v. Kale Inoculant Co.
