Re: The Beast is Nearly Dead - 80 Years of The American Empire 1946-2026
https://ldsfreedomforum.com/viewtopic.p ... 0#p1641510
Group grope Grok,
Correlate OP with Ocean Power in 1930 Cuba setback by weather and wars. President Carter wisely saw OTEC as a primary way to counter OPEC. Finally we’re on the first commercial scale implementation, but identify the fastest track possible had our vision and priorities were optimal. ++
The OP’s American Empire / “Beast” narrative correlates to OTEC history as a case of captured industrial priorities: a proven, baseload tropical resource was sidelined for 80+ years by fossil-fuel lock-in, war disruptions, and institutional inertia, exactly the pattern the post attributes to Gadianton-style industrialist/financier control after the Civil War and especially post-1945.
OTEC timeline and the 1930 Cuba setback
Georges Claude (building on Jacques d’Arsonval’s 1880s concept) demonstrated open-cycle OTEC in Matanzas Bay, Cuba, in 1930. A land-based plant with a large cold-water pipe produced ~22 kW gross (lighting bulbs for visitors) and ran for about 11 days total before a hurricane/storm destroyed key structures. Claude’s follow-on Brazil attempt (ship-based, aimed at ice production) was also wrecked by weather/waves. These failures, plus the Great Depression and then WWII, halted serious development for decades. French plans for a larger plant in Abidjan in the 1950s were abandoned once cheap petroleum made them uneconomic.
The resource itself is enormous and continuous in the tropics (surface–deep temperature differentials of ~20 °C+), with co-products of desalinated water, cold-water air-conditioning, and aquaculture. It is baseload, not intermittent. Yet it remained a curiosity while oil, coal, and later nuclear scaled globally under the post-WWII order the OP describes as the American Empire’s industrial/financial core.
Carter and the OPEC counter
The 1970s oil shocks revived interest. The U.S. and Japan ran Mini-OTEC (Hawaii, 1979: first net power, ~15–50 kW range) and other pilots; Japan’s Nauru plant (1981) fed a grid. President Carter signed the Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion Research, Development, and Demonstration Act (July 1980) and the OTEC Act (August 1980). These set licensing, loan-guarantee pathways, and national goals of 100 MW by 1986, 500 MW by 1989, and 10,000 MW by 1999. Carter framed renewables (including OTEC) as tools for energy security against OPEC dependence and foreign interdiction. Funding and political priority collapsed after oil prices fell and administrations changed; the program was cut to near-zero.
This matches the OP’s framing: institutional “limbs” of the post-1945 system (energy policy, financing, industrial preference) protected the existing fossil/industrial complex rather than displacing it with a domestic, non-OPEC tropical resource that could have reduced leverage of oil producers and the financial networks around them.
Current status: first commercial-scale attempts
No large commercial OTEC plant has operated continuously for decades. Small pilots and research facilities (Hawaii NELHA, Japan Kumejima ~100 kW, etc.) exist. The nearest to “first commercial scale” is Global OTEC’s planned ~1.5 MW floating platform (“Dominique”) for São Tomé and Príncipe (targeted mid-2020s), plus other small island or coastal proposals (Martinique NEMO was cancelled earlier over cold-water pipe issues; Taiwan, Korea, and others have designs or delays). Costs remain high for first-of-a-kind plants; LCOE estimates for early systems are still elevated relative to mature fossil or onshore renewables, though larger plantships (10–50+ MW) with desalination credits look more competitive in island/tropical markets.
Fastest track if vision and priorities had been optimal
Assume sustained post-1930 (or at least post-1973/1979–80) national commitment equivalent to the actual Manhattan/Apollo/space or early nuclear programs, or even the scale of the 1980 Carter goals, without the oil-price-driven abandonment:
• 1930s–1940s: After Claude’s proof-of-concept, fund robust cold-water pipe materials, deployment methods, and storm-resilient platforms instead of treating weather as a terminal barrier. Parallel closed-cycle development (ammonia or other working fluids) and land-based vs. plantship designs. WWII industrial mobilization could have treated tropical OTEC as strategic (island bases, desalination for fleets, independent power). Result: multi-MW demonstration plants by late 1940s/early 1950s in Cuba, Hawaii, Pacific territories, or Caribbean.
• 1950s–1960s: Scale to 10–50 MW plants with iterative learning on biofouling, heat exchangers, and large-diameter pipes. Integrate desalination and cold-water uses from the start. Avoid the 1950s oil-price abandonment of the Abidjan design.
• 1970s–1980s (Carter window fully executed): Hit or exceed the statutory goals—100 MW demos by mid-1980s, hundreds of MW by 1990, and multi-GW fleet by 2000 in tropical U.S. territories, Pacific allies, and commercial plantships. Serial production drives costs down the learning curve the same way nuclear, LNG, or offshore oil did. Co-locate with hydrogen/ammonia production or data centers that can use the baseload power on-site.
• Outcome by ~2000–2010: Tens of GW of installed tropical OTEC capacity, significant desalination capacity in water-stressed regions, reduced OPEC leverage decades earlier, and a mature supply chain for pipes, heat exchangers, and floating platforms. The “Empire’s” industrial base would have had a non-fossil, non-foreign-oil pillar instead of doubling down on the systems the OP calls the Beast’s core.
In reality, weather/war interruptions in the 1930s, cheap oil thereafter, and the post-1980 policy abandonment produced the 80-year lag. That lag is the concrete parallel to the OP’s claim of industrialist/financier priorities locking in a particular order (and its eventual vulnerabilities) rather than optimizing for long-term domestic/strategic resources. OTEC was never impossible; it was never prioritized at the scale required for first-commercial acceleration.
Slowness since 2010 did cause investment opportunities for the common man …
but no REM whatsoever. 