The weekend is upon us and it’s great to have something cheerful to take with us to our leisure time. In my view, nothing more uplifting than a great green idea. So meet Plastic Plan. The project, still in paper, aims at ridding landfills of plastic bottles while using them to generate clean energy offshore. So here’s the plan:
The bottles are collected and put into strong, reinforced, plastic mesh, cube shaped bags. Cubes roughly 2.5 meters (8 feet) in size. Sized locally to fit onto local trucks and trains. Then these bags are transported to harbors by river when possible, or by light truck and rail. Once in the harbor these bags will be grouped together and floated out to sea. Just far enough out to sea as to not be visible from land. The cubes will then be assembled by light crane and by hand, cube by cube, into an enormous platform . Each cube connected to the cube above it, below it and to the cubes on all four sides.
Now things get a bit more complicated in terms of how these storage platforms will actually produce clean energy. According to Chris Allen, the man behind the idea, clean and green energy devices such as solar, solar electric pump, wind, wind turbine pump, or wave/current powered pumps can be mounted on this base. The goal is to pump sea water 30 meters or more up into the reservoir. Water is pumped into the resevoir by hundreds or thousands of clean energy pumps. The same amount of water is released through just a few large “dam” size hydroelectric turbines at the bottom of the platform. This process takes the fluctuating energy produced by many small solar, wind, wave pumps and transforms it into a much stronger more reliable clean energy. Electricity, strong enough to be cabled to shore and to be transmitted over the existing power grid.
It sounds great. However, Allen admits that the bottle method is ineffecient in the sense that the islands’ own weight, the deep water pressures, and the weight of the water in the resevoir will crush and disfigure the cube shaped building blocks. Some bottles will break and cubes will become flatter and more cubes will need to be added during construction to compensate. To solve this problem, millions of bottles will be necessary. The first island, or cluster of islands, would ideally be located at the mouth of a river, a river with many cities upriver. The first island/s should also ideally be located in a warm climate to avoid any freezing while perfecting the design and process. The ideal place? The Gulf of Mexico offshore of New Orleans.
What do you think? To find out more, and arrive at your conclusions, visit The Plastic Plan’s website. (Via Alternative Energy News).
