We don't need nearby gas wells to have our homes heated by gas.

We don't need nearby oil wells or refineries to have our cars run on gasoline.

We don't need nearby power plants for our homes and offices to get electricity.

Energy is highly portable. There is already a national power grid that moves electricity from sources to markets all over the country. Even thirty years ago, the West coast imported electricity from Louisiana. By attaching Sea Solar Power plants to the national grid, it is simple to transmit power to wherever it is needed. The same is true internationally. For example, Sea Solar Power plants located off the southern end of Baja California can transmit power northward to California, and across the Gulf of California to all of Mexico.

In addition, Sea Solar Power plants can convert electrical energy into chemical forms such as liquid hydrogen, methanol, gasoline, ammonia, etc, which can be shipped by tanker virtually anywhere, just as petroleum is transported today.

Underwater cables of the type and capacity needed to move power onshore from Sea Solar Power plants have been in daily use for more than 35 years.

The entire thing is little more than an arrangement of existing technology. No breakthroughs are required, only clever application of known engineering principles.

For example: Published designs for one of the largest components of a Sea Solar Power plant, the cold water pipe, typically run into tens of thousands of tons of structured materials. My own design for a 25 Mwe plant uses only 500 tons of materials, and at current construction prices, would cost only circa $5,000,000 or so.

Similarly, most of the heat exchangers proposed are of gigantic size, yet it is possible to build heat exchangers at about 1/8 the size and cost of the standard heat exchangers proposed. This was demonstrated by Sea Solar Power's heat exchanger test facility, and the results were validated and certified by the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Maryland. The secret lies in the remarkable heat exchange tubes, which I have actually held in my hands. One has only to look at them to see how they increase heat transfer eightfold.

Once the heat exchangers have been shrunk, the rest of the plant shrinks accordingly. The estimated cost of a 25 Mwe prototype is only some $30 to $50 million, a pittance per megawatt compared to nuclear plants, and comparing favorably to modern coal-fired plants with their expensive pollution control equipment. The cost of power from such a plant would be lower than that from any other plant of any kind that can be built with today's technology.

The same portability pertains to all of the rest of the energy sources named: wind, photovoltaic, and biomass.

David F Mayer