The Oceans Thermal Promise

http://www.earthportal.org/news/?p=2165

This article really made me think. Especially this:

The basics are well-accepted. With 23 million square miles of surface area — 70 percent of the Earth — the ocean is the world’s biggest sunbather. The amount of heat it absorbs each day is equal to burning hundreds of billions of oil barrels. Tapping into even one-tenth of a percent of that energy, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory says, would yield...

...20 times as much electricity as the United States uses in a day.

Further down in the article:

In either case, OTEC offers something that few renewable resources can — baseload power. While wind and solar are known to be fickle, ocean thermal backers say it can provide hundreds of megawatts every minute of the day.