[ExI] Trump Says a Smart President Is All That’s Needed to Rein In A.I.

[spike at rainier66.com]

...> On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat


>>... These three examples don't say how the data centers deal with 
> unpredictability and intermittency of wind power

>...What, you've never heard of ocean thermal electric conversion?  Use the ocean as a thermal battery.

_______________________________________________


Yes I have, but that technology is irrelevant to the power storage needs of a data center.  The sea is highly relevant as a potential heat sink however.

Regarding that notion, I had an idea.  We are experiencing an anomalously quiet Atlantic hurricane season.  This historic average has us up at 74 ACE units by now.  This year we have... 4.4 units.  

https://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Realtime/index.php?loc=northatlantic

I feel cheated.  Well, not really, I am pleased, for I still own Florida real estate, and I have people I care about living there now.  Hurricanes are a bad thing in Florida: its elevation along the coast is too low.

Hurricanes are heat engines of a sort.  They run on heat at the ocean surface, spinning up and delivering the heat to the cool upper atmosphere.  When there is a strong El Nino, the upper atmosphere is warmer, so the temperature differential is lower, so the hurricanes, even if they don't get sheared apart, have less fuel and as a result they aren't as violent and energetic.

OK then.  What if... we build power plants out on the continental shelf east of Florida?  The water isn't all that deep out there, so the towers could be built in the sea bottom, which isn't that far down there, rather than floating.  Or it could be floating, either way.  

Check out this cool image, Google in satellite view:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Florida/@26.883389,-83.7996933,1380415m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x88c1766591562abf:0xf72e13d35bc74ed0!8m2!3d27.6648274!4d-81.5157535!16zL20vMDJ4cnk?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDkxNS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

Note how far the continental shelf reaches 50 miles or more east of Jacksonville Florida.

If we had power plants out there, the water vapor could be lofted into the atmosphere, warming stuff up high.  Then the hurricanes that form off the west coast of Africa would encounter both warmer water (as climate change warms the sea surface) but also a warmer upper atmosphere because of power plants belching heat up there.  Then, the hurricanes would have less potential to wreck expensive stuff in the north Atlantic, ja?

spike