Energy from the sun heats up the surface of the ocean. As that heat irradiates up and fuels storms, they can become ever more dangerous hurricanes. Reducing their destructive potential is possible if we can just cool off the surface of the ocean. Even just one degree centigrade might be the difference between a category 4 or category 5 hurricane. This is a nearly ridiculous notion because of the scale involved. Thousands of square miles of ocean surface might need to be cooled off.
The Salter Sink is a simple idea, with massive potential. Two insights make it very compelling:
Everywhere there is hot water on the surface of the ocean, there is cold water down below.
This makes us think you just need to stir the ocean up a little bit. Of course, that too would take a staggering amount of energy, but…
There is a tremendous amount of energy available – in waves.
Wave energy is often dismissed as impractical to use because it is located far from people (where we need energy). It is also difficult to harness because of the harsh conditions equipment would have to sustain.
The Salter Sink works as a wave powered pump. Waves push hot water into the top of the cylinder, which pumps the water inside down. It comes out the bottom (around 200 meters below) and mixes with colder water. This brings the temperature on the surface down over time. A Salter Sink can move about a gigawatt of thermal energy! It may take thousands of these to protect America’s Gulf region (for example) but we estimate the cost would be much lower than the damage caused by one of these storms.
This concept is delightfully simple and singularly gargantuan. It has captured our imagination here in the lab for a couple years, and we hope lots of other folks will find it interesting as well. This movie illustrates the idea, and we also have a Salter Sink White Paper with more detail.
High quality m4v video.
As hurricane season gets rolling, we’ve been getting a lot of interest in our hurricane suppression technology, which could be a simple way to reduce the force of these massive storms. These inquiries are the result of press about Bill Gates being one of the (twelve) inventors listed on the patent. We often host “invention sessions” with a wide variety of experts in the same room exploring problems and ideas. In the lab, we call this invention the “Salter Sink” as it originates with ideas of Stephen Salter, who has worked extensively on wave energy. We’ve been working to validate aspects of this idea and research some of the big questions about how well it would work. We’ll continue to do so, and begin sharing some of this work in a few months.
In the mean time, I’d like to point out that we aren’t building this device, and have no plan to. We are exploring ideas to solve the world’s hard problems in energy and climate issues, and need lots of other folks to research them too before they can be considered for deployment.
It might be possible to suppress hurricanes so they aren’t so devastating to people who live in their path. We’ve been inventing in this area along with climate change and alternative energy sources. Today a patent application related to this was published by the USPTO and TechFlash has written a nice piece about this. Some of the questions that came up in the comments there are about whether this type of inventing should be done in the first place. We absolutely believe that we should investigate our options should the environmental change cause severe disruption. This type of technology is not something humankind would try as a “Plan A” or “Plan B.” These inventions are a “Plan C” where humans decide that we have exhausted all of our behavior changing and alternative energy options and need to rely on mitigation technologies. If our planet is in this severe situation, then our belief is that we should not be starting from scratch at investigating mitigation options.
We’re looking forward to discussing these ideas and will post more about them here later this year.
