The Tidal Irrigation and Electrical System



Martin on Apr 12th 2008

There are many potential products and benefits once a TIE System is constructed. Electricity, food, carbon credits and fuel are all outputs of the power plant design. The amount that is generated of each is directly related to the amount of deep ocean water (DOW) that is moved to the surface by the artificial atoll. So, DOW can be thought of as the fuel that makes almost all of the products possible. The cost of moving a cubic meter DOW goes down the larger that the lagoon of the TIE System is. This is what makes a TIE system interesting and should make a compelling case for the exploration of the idea.

The cost of building an artificial atoll is linear. Every meter of artificial atoll wall costs as much as the next (actually it gets cheaper as savings can be made in mass producing sections of atoll wall but for simplicity’s sake let’s just say the cost remains the same for each linear meter of atoll wall) but as the lagoon of the artificial atoll grows in size the amount of DOW brought to the surface increases out of proportion.

It is easy to illustrate: imagine there is a TIE System that has a 2 meter tidal flux and a circumference of 6.28 km. It would move 6,283,185 cubic meters of DOW in a flux. Now imagine instead a TIE System with a circumference of 62.8 km. It would move 628,318,530 cubic meters of DOW in a flux. In other words, something ten times as big costs ten times as much but produces 100 times the output.

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