OTEC Touted as Technology to Combat Sea Level Rise

We’re quoting liberally today from comments by inventor Jim Baird to an Energy Collective piece on global warming and sea level rise by David Hone, a “senior climate change advisor” for Shell International Petroleum Company.

Baird’s comments take a surprising turn on Hone’s piece (and one Hone probably couldn’t have anticipated) by praising ocean thermal energy conversion’s (OTEC) potential to both power the planet and be a remedy for sea level rise.

Some Googling suggests Baird is an inventor of something called the Global Warming Mitigation Method, and OTEC has a role. Here are some of his comments to Hone’s piece:

“Not only does OTEC remedy the problem of thermal expansion, it is also the remedy to our dying oceans.”

“OTEC consumes heat already in the system rathern than generating more heat to produce energy that inevitably leads to additional warming, most of which is accumulating in our oceans.”

“OTEC has the prospect of becoming the largest global source of renewable energy while mitigating global warming.”

“If OTEC isn’t the climate’s Silver Bullet, it is certainly the next best thing.”

That’s the kind of enthusiasm and full-on support we like to see for OTEC, which is what we’ve also tried to generation from this blog’s first post. Thank you, Jim Baird, for making a strong case for ocean thermal energy conversion.

It’s a case Hawaii residents and government officials need to embrace in total to simultaneously end our debilitating dependence on imported oil and provide an inexhaustible supply of energy to power our state.