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I saw a video clip of an interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson saying,

"I'm tired looking at countless thousands of cars exiting a city because a hurricane is coming. Where are the engineers and scientists saying you know instead of running away from the city that is about to be destroyed by this hurricane, let me figure out a way to tap the cyclonic energy of this hurricane to drive the power needs of the city that is otherwise going to destroy it."

I am assuming that is an absurd idea, but I have no engineering background. Am I correct in this assumption?

Bob516
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Near future (next 40 years), no.

The problem is scale. Building a device to capture wind and wave energy is easy(well, to Solar Mike's credit, wind is easier which is why you don't see many wave systems). Building a device to capture extreme wind and wave energy is hard, and even harder if you're trying to extract all the energy from a system that is 10's of kilometers wide and includes 5 meter high walls of water. A structure that could capture the energy of a hurricane would be humanity's greatest achievement by an order of magnitude. Making it pay out when the wind shows up in a location every 50 years is impossible without some new breakthrough tech we can't even imagine yet. Plus people who live on the coast probably don't want to live behind such a machine.

Neil has the luxury of sitting around imagining stuff, because no one really makes money off of astronomy, they just spend money. Engineering doesn't really work that way, you need a payout, even for public works.

Fred
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Tiger Guy
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Simple answer:

  • Unfortunately no, it is impossible to do. Currently, there is no technology to do that.

A slightly more difficult answer

  • Even if the technology existed, it would cost too much. A structure of that size (and complexity) could be compared to Three Gorges Dam (i.e 30¹ billion USD). So finding investors would be really difficult.

Sources:

  • ¹=https://www.power-technology.com/projects/gorges/
Deki 333
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