Thank you Leopold summerer.

Preparedness for energy harnessing from tropical cyclone and channeling network development at global level is needed. otherwise technology-wise we have the talent. 

Dear Dr. Najak,

a cyclone truly is a force of nature and scale, volatility and unpredictability makes it economically nonfeasible to tap into this energy source. It would require a mobile plant to harvest the energy, because the storm, even if available once a year, will not cover the same area every time.

Considering that the power in moving air grows with wind speed by v³ please take this into account:

A 6MW windmill operates at maximum power from a wind speed of about 13m/s and is limited to no more than 25m/s.

Within a cyclone, the speed will easily be 55m/s  leading to 75 times the power per area compared to 13m/s, demanding 450MW from your 6MW windmill.

To extract a noteworthy fraction of the energy the storm holds, try estimating the energy you harvest and ask yourself the question, what do to with it.

It can't be injected to any grid as nobody needs this excessive amount of power, so you would have to store it.

Storing these TWh in a matter of hours would demand storage devices of TWh that could only be fully used once a year - maybe twice. Well -  if you somehow manage to transfer the energy from a moving plant to the fixed storage devices. Additionally, energy conversion would need devices that can handle Powers in a TW-Regime.

Though I like the idea of supplying green Cyclone Power to the world, I do not see a conventional technical way to make it happen.

Dear Martin Schulz 

Its a very nice and critical analysed way to answer the question. Off course it is difficult but modern technologies of harvesting may be come up in the future . Once again thank you very much.

Mark Jacobson from Stanford recently published some work saying it's feasible.  See http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/february/hurricane-winds-turbine-022614.html.

Hi Cole,

call me nitpicking, but the report tells:

In the case of Katrina, Jacobson's model revealed that an array of 78,000 wind turbines off the coast of New Orleans would have significantly weakened the hurricane well before it made landfall.

If operated at rated power of 6MW we talk about 468GW of power.

This is about 80% of the power, the US generates on nuclear plants, accounting for 15% of their overall power demand.

Simulations like these may show what you could achieve but given that the US are reluctant to put up a few hundred wind power plants, the chances they will build tens of thousands in the years to come is negligible.

A further note:

The simulation assumes, the hurricane strikes the plants on the edges only.

Once a storm exceeding 60 or even 70m/s like recently seen in Japan, the wind farm will be gone.

Today, survival speed for windmills is about 55m/s and the power dragging on the mill will increase by a factor 2 if wind speed increases from 55 to 70 m/s.

You really think an investor is going to take this risk?

But in the end, I would love to be proven wrong :-)

Dear Wesley J. Cole thank you very much.

Even if we overcome all the problems of energy harvesting, how to distribute it to the net or how to store it?  

One has to come a new concept.  

Dear Dr. Ravindran S. Sir

You are absolutely right, but i hope the modern technologies can able to utilised the energy. Off course it is difficult to store or distribute, but it can be possible if we have such heavy industry near by production sites.

As Martin pointed out, the power of the cyclone wind is too strong for our current turbine technologies. Even if we had turbines that could withstand the enormous wind forces, its the radical changes in wind speed and direction that pose the real design challenges. (although technologies like http://www.google.com/makani/ will help)

Storm surge is perhaps less dynamic, so maybe tidal and or wave power might be more tractable? Of course, there is still the problem of storage.

Thank you dear Jordan.

Dr Dileswar Nayak, 

Cyclone and Storm are too powerful for our existing machines.  Lightening also has large power.  Today's technology may not be for them.  They are unpredictable in many ways (frequency of occurrence, direction of their movement, time of crossing the shore, power etc.).  

Why not we think of improving the following possible and simpler solutions:  

1)  Effect of a Cyclone or the Storm - RAIN WATER;  It can be stored with good infrastructure, for very long time.  

2)  Joining of the revers like Ganga and Kavery.  

3)  Energy conservation in every house; why not make the Energy Development Agencies more effective?  

4)  If you see the Southern part of Tamil Nadu, lot of wind mills have been installed.  I find many of them are static even for good wind velocities.  Why not we plan to fix all of them?  

5)  Fuel Cells are good for certain cases.  

6)  If we feel all of these are not good; why not at least import technology, which are cost effective and fuel economical?  

Regards, 

Dr.S.Ravindran

Thank you Dr Ravindran

 Very interesting discussion.

Since you asked about reducing the power of the hurricane, we were discussing this with a geography class recently. To use a temperature absorbing reaction (endothermic) one can use potash (very abundant in our area) that absorbs the energy released when clouds form. Potash will dissolve in water (cloud) plus would absorb the energy and reduce the cloud and hence the power of any storm cloud.

Potash will need to be granulated in a powder form and "bomb" the storm cloud. It would be interesting to test this in the lab before going any further.

Instead of harnessing the energy, why not redirect the rainfall to areas that need it? You can watch this week, as the Cyclone Fani, instead of making landfall in the middle of India, is getting pushed by the wall of the Pakistan-Arabia Dust Cloud at 120 degrees off track towards the NE, to smack right in the center of Bangladesh. You can see from comparing the daily NAAPS dust cloud images with the storm track, that it only takes 20-40 micrograms of atmospheric dust per cubic meter, to make a tropical cyclone change its path? Instead, if we eliminate the atmospheric dust clouds, by replanting those areas with local native plants, then we could have the rain clouds come back naturally, and direct the rainfall from cyclones to desert areas, rather than create floods for the people of Bangladesh later on this week?