Harnessing the power of the earth in different ways.

So after reading workinman’s response to hydroelectric power from rain, I had a thought:

What about finding other ways to harness the power of the earth?

We have tidal power, wind power, etc, but what about this:

Harnessing the power created by, lets say, an earthquake or a hurricane?

With an earthquake, a lot of energy is produced since it takes a lot of it to shift the plates. And given that the San Andreas fault line can be fairly active, why not use that towards some good?

Anyone ever thought of putting wind turbines in the Gulf which gets slammed by hurricanes? Might do some good provided they are built strong enough. Granted, they would only be useful for certain times of the year, but they might do some good as well.

I think these are a couple of good ideas, and I’m sure there are more.

Opinions?

imho to make a wind turbine withstand hurricane force winds it would be very cost prohibitive, I think it would be more effective to built low cost vertical axis wind turbines and line highways to power road lighting and service centers. I don’t know about the effect weather fronts have on water currents and tide levels but i would guess that tidal generators may be a better idea.

When you said road lighting, you gave me an idea:

Lightening occurs frequently. Has there ever been a thought regarding some sort of use from it, if possible?

lightening does occur often and it is definatly a largre amount of electricity.. i guess the biggest question would be how to capture and store such a huge force… and of course predicting when and where it would strike. but wow, one bolt could probally run a whole city for a while

our atmosphere contains a lot of energy… Art Bell (don’t know if you know him) had a huge antenna setup in the desert that would pickup electricity right out of the air… not sure the setup but I don’t think it was complicated at all..

The CN Tower has a lightening rod at the top and lightening strikes frequently when there are storms. I wonder if anyone thought to harness that power.

Frankenstein’s source of life is a very strong energy source. Correct me if Im wrong if ever someone has watched this episode on NGC, a lightning bolt’s temperature is comparable to the surface of the sun. Most scientists believe that those gigaflops of energy may be too dangerous to experiment with since we don’t have the technology “yet” to harness it.

I wonder how complicated that technology would be? I mean, what’s the point of a lightening rod on the tallest object in the city when most lightening would strike that object anyway?

However, technological advances are being made all the time and it won’t be long until they figure it out.

I also don’t know what the effects would be of draning electricity out of the earth, I mean it’s there for a reason so I don’t know how it would affect our environment and weather…

For some reason, I am thinking about balance. Im not really sure what the lightning does when it happens but we all know it’s been there since the beginning of time. I somehow think lightning is somewhat beneficial to nature and keeps it in balance.

Anyone who researched about this natural activity care to give a more detailed explaination?

Hurricane and earthquake power? Geo-thermo power is probably the best way to go in terms of heating your house and providing hot water. I’m sure some innovative person could make it power other things

Im quite interested in this idea of art bell and his antenna. I never thought that ther’d be just free power floating around ready to be picked up with the right equipment. Does anybody know where i can find some information about it?
I think that one of the best ways, energy could be saved is building solar pannels into street lights. a bit like the ones on you might have in your garden, trapping the sunlight in the day and releasing it at night. of course this wouldn’t fully power the streetlights but if they had them on every streetlight it’d save an awful lot of power throughout the country.

That’s a bright idea(pardon the pun). It would be nice to see all cities all over the world doing something like that.

Messing with stuff like lightning is a bit scary, but I think the wind/wave turbines in hurricane areas is a great idea. Something good coming out of something so often viewed as bad. The only problem I could see with that is if they don’t build it strong enough to withstand the weather, the wind gets stronger than they predicted, or even a tsunami. Don’t know about anyone else but I’d rather not have a 500 pound wind turbine flying at me in the middle of a big storm. Hah..