Every once in a while, I find it refreshing and stimulating to stop thinking about circuits and to ponder where we will get all of the electricity to power those circuits in the coming years. During a recent trip to the big island in Hawaii, I got a reminder. My wife and I visited NELHA, the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority, located between the ocean and the Kailua-Kona airport, and took a half-day “Friends of NELHA” tour, conducted by the organization’s Executive Director Candee Ellsworth (an ocean biologist and zoologist), which included a wholly unexpected but powerful reminder that it was again time to ponder the future of power generation.
NELHA and the associated HOST (Hawaii Ocean Science and Technology) Park was founded by Dr. John Piña Craven, a former chief scientist for the US Navy’s Special Projects Office with a resume like James Bond. (Look him up.) NEHLA was founded on a simple premise: stick a few very long pipes into the ocean to bring up ancient, cold seawater from 3000 feet deep and put a few more pipes into the ocean to draw in warm surface seawater, supply the water at low cost to a host of commercial enterprises, and let them find useful and profitable things to do with these inexpensive liquid resources in combination with Hawaii’s abundant solar energy, supplied daily by a giant fusion reactor located 93 million miles away (the Sun).
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