Let us dabble in the fantastic for a moment, shall we?

Fuel cells and solar power are all well and good, but everybody and his brother already know about them. What about those ridiculously fantastical ideas? The kind that are just now emerging, work only in theory, or are simply imagined by Yours Truly. These are just ideas to mull over or think about, and aren't necessarily probable or even logically sound. Nevertheless, I'm pretty much always thinking about these sorts of things.

Let's start of with something straightforward. I think we all can agree that the ocean is pretty huge. It has lots of water, lots of space, and lots of...well...fish. The fish point is mildly irrelevant, but water and open space are certainly useful. A hydroelectric power plant is any plant that uses the kinetic energy of water to create electricity. Hydroelectricity is the world's biggest source of renewable energy, and I'll probably be covering it at some point later. It simply uses a flow of water to turn a big turbine, thus creating electricity. Now, when most people think of hydroelectricity, they think of a big river stopped up by a big dam. For the most part, this IS how hydroelectricity is produced. However, rivers are limited. There are only so many rivers in the world, and we can't exactly stop them all up to create electricity, lest we cause massive environmental issues down the road. However, why must it be a river? If any flow of water can turn a turbine, why not look to the ocean. Let's take a look at the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream is a massive current of water that cruises along the eastern coast of the United States and cuts across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. Think of the Gulf Stream like a river within the ocean: it is constantly moving, and will never run out. Hypothetically, it could be completely possible to place the same hydroelectric turbines at the bottom of the ocean, right smack in the middle of the Gulf Stream. If it works for rivers, why not the ocean? In theory, and this is pretty much just my own speculation, this could be a constant source of completely renewable energy. However, the ocean has even more uses than just huge currents. The vast flat space offered by the ocean allows yet another form of renewable energy to be used here: wind power. Wind farms, or large clusters of wind turbines, have been popping up all over dry land for years now. However, this leads to many issues. They are rather noisy, mildly unpleasant to look at, and difficult to transport. Furthermore, there is a limited amount of flat open land, and the wind doesn't always blow here. However, wind farms on the ocean solve virtually all of these issues. They will be far away from anyone who would prefer not to have a massive, spinning windmill in their backyard. They would be far easier to transport and assemble at sea, due to the great mobility of sea cranes. Furthermore, deep water is considerably less rough than dry land, causing the wind the be far more powerful and constant than here. Clearly, the ocean has a lot to offer.

Well, those were both fairly straightforward. However, I think I'm about to go off the deep end with this next section, so here is my official warning.
I've got a pretty fantastic idea, in my humble opinion. It's kind of simple in essence, mildly similar to the aforementioned windmills or hydroelectric plants, but the driving force behind it is slightly more abstract than simply water or wind. There is a gratuitous amount of mass simply flying around the universe and passing through the earth as you read this. This substance is referred to as "dark matter," simply because it is difficult to detect. It is impossible to see, feel, hear, or interact with in any way. However, due to the massive nature of the dark matter, scientists are able to prove its existence, through observing the rotation of galaxies or observing the bending of light around massive pockets of seemingly invisible gravity. Now this is all well and good, but what does it actually do for us? Well, there are chunks of mass zipping all over the universe at thousands of miles per hour. If this mass were able to exert force on regular matter, that would be a force exerted over a distance, also known as the definition of energy. If a substance or material could be designed that can physically interact with dark matter, it could potentially be possible to create a dark matter "windmill" that could create energy in exactly the same way as a hydroelectric turbine. In theory, I think it's a stupendous idea, but in practice...well, no such substance has been discovered yet, but someday...who knows?

Ahem: an Update: I've gotten a pretty positive response from my Dark Matter rant, so I just thought that I might expand a bit, and apply my freaky physics nonsense to something happening right now in the real world. Over in Switzerland, perhaps you've heard of the Large Hadron Collider, also known as "that machine that's gonna end the world in 2012" to the fools that believe the Mayans could predict the future. But I digress. Anyway, I feel as though 98% of the people in the world are positive that this thing is going to create big evil black holes that are going to compress the planet into the size of a tic tac, and about 2% actually know what the LHC is supposed to do. Now, I don't really know all the stuff it's supposed to help discover, but I do know that one of the things is proving the theory of dark matter. Theoretically, by slamming together these particles at 99.999% the speed of light, many believe that this could create dark matter, thus allowing those wacky Swiss scientists to potentially prove its existence, develop ways to detect it, and potentially even find ways to interact with it. So I suppose my idea's not so preposterous after all.