Forbes Magazine – The Power of the Moon

by Nigel Holloway
July 21, 2003

The tides are as predictable as night and day, and they're powerful, too. Now there's a way of using their kinetic energy to produce electricity.

Excerpt

In 1964, when Peter Ullman was attending an international high school in Naples, Italy, where his father was a visiting professor, he would go down to the docks to see off his fellow students returning by ship to the U.S.

He noticed that the angle of the gangplank changed between the time he went on board to say good-bye to his friends and the time he disembarked. If the sea could lift a huge ocean liner, could the tidal energy be harnessed in some other way, too?

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