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Comment by hos234 | Hacker News Reader

I hope someday we learn to make controllable mini-storms. All kinds of interesting things to study thanks to the energy levels.

From wikipedia - "Scientists estimate that a tropical cyclone releases heat energy at the rate of 50 to 200 exajoules (10^18 J) per day, equivalent to about 1 PW (10^15 watt). This rate of energy release is equivalent to 70 times the world energy consumption of humans and 200 times the worldwide electrical generating capacity, or to exploding a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclone

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Energy has to come from somewhere. It's not like a nuclear reactor where it starts in place. With hurricanes, we're talking about the energy in area of the entire ocean being concentrated.

Better off creating hurricane-proof windmills.

Yup. That's really the only way to take energy out of the ocean. If we could somehow fill the surface of the Atlantic with turbines and wave-energy machines, perhaps we could end destructive tropical storms. But the amount of energy involved is astonishing and difficult to reason about.

Not the only way. There’s been research into passively driving deep cold water up got the surface to slow down tropical storms.

Maybe you could use it to power ocean cleanup drones, which could use harvested material to manufacture more cleanup drone hulls.

At that scale, you're looking at something in the vicinity of a Kardashev Type-I civilization.

The Butterfly Effect comes to mind. What happens if you instead create a cyclone?

Hurricane proof windmills, as someone else mentioned, and lightning catching supercapicitors would help capture all a lot of it. Might be easier than covering large areas of land with solar panels.

I wonder if it would be possible to engineer a stable fixed cyclone of any size from a tiny dust devil to a tornado to a hurricane.

The book "Echopraxia" by Peter Watts has exactly this in it. It's a great read!

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