The White Square in the photo behind represents 7,000 cargo containers floating as a reef off Revere Beach. It supports wind, solar, wave, etc. coastal electricity generation. Hydroponic rice farming creates fodder for caged lobsters. The square lagoon supports free ranging salmon farming.
COTS Coastal & Mid-Ocean Wind, Solar, Wave Electricity Generator Islands
Commercial Off The Shelf Cargo Containers (COTS CC) are supported by a 50+year supply chain transported by many vehicle types for transporting goods. And even demonstrating niche re-purposing into many and varied uses such as COTS Wind Generator Islands.
This proposal suggests Boston's MassPort Drydock 3 could support the re-purposing of empty Cargo Containers (CC's) into air-tight, water-tight, "brick buildings" supporting coastal wind generators, etc. in any water depth, indefinitely. Perhaps for centuries.
CC's are available in vast quantities (1,000,000's) at 6 rated qualities (ranked from "New" at $6,000 to "Scrap" at $1,000 or $1,500 in New York). Existing handling equipment allows spraying of "ceramic polyurethane" ("Rhino Shield" or "Liquid Ceramic" 50+year house coatings) paint and adhesive as well as mechanical bonding gadgets to create "brick and mortar" buildings that float.
The buoyancy force of 1 sealed CC is 20+times the empty CC weight. Drydock 3 can assemble CC's into 220ft wide by 11,000ft long (27 wide x 275 long = 7,500 CC) [cost $7.5M assembled in 1.5days] structure that is larger than Boston's Logan Airport main runway [10,000ft]. And this structure can be moved and anchored wherever water of 6+ft or deeper is available.
Besides being a wind, solar, wave, thermal, tidal, etc. electricity generator support structure, many other purposes are possible for such a structure just as bricks and mortar have created structures with many purposes; i.e. airport runways, breakwaters, causeways, bridges, aqua-farms, harbors, lagoons, seaside communities, etc. since 1700's in Boston.
Additional uses can be realized once cavernous hollow interior structures are created; i.e. airport hangers, hydroponic farms, covered docks, container ship transfer ports without size, draft, or clearance limitations, etc.
Mid-ocean agricultural food production structure can serve the starving world by hydroponic rice growing with stalks being turned into fodder for both caged and free ranging sea life resources. Supported on this artificial floating reef and serving as a wind, solar, wave, thermal, etc. power source; it creates electricity in mid-ocean.
These CC's can also form the brick like floor and walls of aquatic structures; i.e. canals, wharves, dikes, levees, etc.
Hydrogen gas production and other extended uses are imaginable. And once these standard steel CC's have created a marketplace; then remediated toxic waste dump metals can produce these CC's structures. The remediation process has demonstrated reclaiming 50% of its waste into a metal sheet of chrome-vanadium stainless steel. One of the isolated and purified metals is gold.
