excess0680 comments on Solar Panels Are Now Producing So Much Power That They’re Leaving Nuclear Plants in the Dust: "Solar is now the engine of the power transition."

[–] excess0680@lemmy.world 1 point 1 week ago (5 children)

The opposite happens. Tidal energy is what causes the moon to drift farther away from the earth, as the moon loses angular velocity.

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[–] gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org 1 point 6 days ago

actually, the moon gains angular momentum from the tidal movement that it causes, and that's what makes it move further away. the reason is that it takes Earth about 1 day to rotate once around its axis, but it takes the moon 28 days to rotate once around Earth's axis. so Earth has a higher angular velocity, and the tidal movement tries to reduce that difference to make the two tidally locked eventually. ironically, this process transfers angular momentum to the moon (to speed it up), which makes it move further away and thus the angular velocity actually decreases. yeah, orbital mechanics is weird.

(btw this is not a joke. it's really that way, difficult to comprehend i know).

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[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

But does harvesting it make it go faster or slower away?

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[–] excess0680@lemmy.world 1 point 6 days ago (2 children)

If you mean harvesting tidal energy, the effect on the moon would be minimal. The loss of angular momentum the moon experiences is due to the mass of the earth’s waters. I could not imagine anything humans could build that could extract enough tidal energy that it would disrupt the moon without utterly destroying the environment at the same time (by way of nullifying tides somehow). In fact, to harness tidal energy, one way would be to use underwater turbines. They would have an immediate effect to the local environment but a negligible amount to the moon itself.

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[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 point 6 days ago (1 child)

I know its minimal, I'm not saying it's a concern, I'm just saying if we are harvesting it, doesn't that mean it's pulling us closer to it? It's not magically free energy (in the physics sense), so what else could it be other than converting the potential gravitational energy between the earth and moon into something else?

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[–] gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org 1 point 6 days ago*

see my other reply in this thread

basically it doesn't move the moon closer, but it makes the Earth rotate slower. that's where the energy comes from.

basically the tides transfer angular momentum from the Earth to the moon.

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