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Comment by simonhorlick | Hacker News Reader

Did you know that tidal energy is actually not renewable? Harvesting tidal energy slightly slows the rotation of the planet over time. Here's a quote from the relevant paper by Liu:

> Based on the average pace of world energy consumption over the last 50 years, if we were to extract the rotational energy just to supply 1% of the world's energy consumption, the rotation of the Earth would lock to the Moon in about 1000 years.

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That paper assumes that the worlds energy will keep increasing at the average rate from the last 50 years for 1000 years.

That’s a terrible assumption. First because the rate has been slowing (even before Covid), and second because the end result of that extrapolation is more energy than we could every hope to produce without building Dyson spheres around stars.

If you do similar calculations we’d cause severe problems harvesting that much energy from wind or geothermal as well.

Hmm have you asked intel and nvidia about that?

I did not. And find mind boggling that we have the ability to virtually stop earth rotation in such a small timeframe with that little effort. I'll definitely read more about it.

There’s discussion about that piece here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37383283

Solution: in summer we pump the tides higher with PV, and in winter we draw them down.

Source: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/zjl/pdf/tide1.pdf

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