The Daily Katabatic  

One (not entirely serious) comment in the WorldChanging post on wind power that I linked to earlier tonight caught my eye, as it proposed a unlikely scheme to harness the winds flowing off large Antarctic icebergs and use them as massive hydrogen farms powered by wind turbines. This made me feel quite nostalgic, as I recalled the heady days of the early 1990's.

One of my mates had done a couple of stints working down south for the Antarctic Division and one night we were drinking beer and discussing crazy business ideas, and came up with a plan to sell chipped antarctic iceberg ice to the Japanese as a luxury drink additive ("pure ice") with no modern day contamination.

At the time Tokyo was in the manic phase of the Japanese bubble, with oxygen bars and mineral water with gold flakes in it being some of the hot trends in money wasting, so it wasn't quite as stupid an idea as it may seem now. We even got as far as pricing the hire of the Russian ice-breakers needed to go and collect the stuff before sanity returned and we gave up on the idea. Pity though - it would have been a pleasing weird way of getting rich if it had worked.

They forgot to indicate all the monstrously big tabular icebergs in the great Southern Ocean. These bergs drift there for decades on end, often measure more than 20 miles in length (small islands), and would be the perfect sites for hydrogen production.

Windspeeds over these bergs are consistently in class 7, and we know that the energy available increases as the cube of the wind speed, so it would be great to harvest these powerful winds. Anyone want sail down there and put some electrolisers + turbines on a few bergs?