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The first week of 2024 has already been a rollercoaster of good and bad news for President Joe Biden’s offshore wind ambitions. The nation’s first large-scale wind farm just started producing power for the New England power grid. The bad news is that another major project on the East Coast threw in the towel, the latest casualty of skyrocketing costs that are pushing Biden’s offshore wind dreams out of reach.The plan, according to the Biden administration, was for the US to get 30,000MW of energy from offshore wind by…

In an average day, tropical oceans absorb about 278 petawatt-hours of solar energy. Harvesting just 1/4000th of that energy would supply the entire world's daily electricity – and ocean thermal energy conversion provides a possible method. Harvesting energy from the temperature differential between the warm surface and the cold deep ocean is certainly not a new idea – indeed, it was first trialed 142 years ago in 1881, and a 22-kilowatt OTEC plant was built in Cuba in 1930. The basic idea is this: you go to an area with a…