Ecotopia: A Novel

by Ernest Callenbach

the Punta Gorda thermal sea-power station, which might be taken for a reconstruction of some mad duke’s medieval fortress. It squats on the shoreline at a point where deep and very cold water lies only a few miles offshore, and sucks up seawater through a monstrous pipe. Smaller pipes run this way and that, connected to generators and pumps. Engineers explained to me that the system is something like a giant refrigerator running in reverse. Since water can store enormous quantities of heat energy, even a relatively small temperature differential can be made to yield large amounts of power if suitably ingenious heat exchangers are employed—but great quantities of water must be pumped up to take advantage of this principle. The sheer architectural mass of the plant is overwhelming; it seems almost an extension of the tides themselves. (The deep cold water is very nutrient-rich. Some of it is therefore pumped into nearby ponds to warm up before being injected into the system along with already warm surface water—but while in the ponds it feeds fish and shellfish, which are an important byproduct of the plant.)