There are basically three big groupings of people when it comes to energy
- People who believe that the govern-cement is hiding free-energy devices (or aliens will come down and give them to us, or Tesla will be resurrected)
- People who believe that we are going to run out of "fossil fuels" and go Mad Max and return to living in caves.
- People who believe there is no real problem, because we have a century of coal left in the ground, etc…
Well, first of all, we never really lived in caves. Caves are cold and damp and often have wild animals that come to visit. Even mountain men, with not but a big knife build themselves cabins that will defend themselves against the worst mother nature can throw at them. Our ancestors weren't that stupid. Building stone cathedrals in the "dark ages", sheesh, how does anyone believe we just crawled out of caves?
Anyway, i wanted to discuss possibilities for near term electrical production.
Parts of these ideas were published in Popular Science and Popular Mechanics over 50 years ago.
So, i really do not want to hear comments that these things can't be done, unless you are speaking politically, then of course, TPTshouldn'tB want to keep this from happening
Geothermal Energy
What everyone balks at when people talk about geothermal energy is that you have to drill down five miles before you get heat hot enough to boil water. And five miles is a long way to drill. And it gets dangerous. The further down you go, the more chances you have of running into hot pockets, explosive gasses and other drilling hazards.
Of course boiling water for steam is really simple and easy, but water is not the only stuff that boils and expands. Refrigerants (like in your refrigerator) also do this. The ones used in your fridge boil at really low temperatures. However, there are ones that boil around 150° like Trichlorotrifluoroethane.
To get to 150°-160° you only have to drill about 3 miles down. (the same distance (total) as most oil wells.) Much easier and much less likely to get into dangerous areas. After that, you just boil Trichlorotrifluoroethane, and use it to spin a turbine to run a genset, and viola, power.
So, for the price of an oil well, you can have energy to run a small community pretty much forever. Well, until the earth cools down and stops being so volcanic. You know, at least more than 100 years.
Real Solar
Now, if you live somewhere where it is hot and sunny, you can do the above thing with easy, and cheap roof panels to collect heat. Again, 212° for boiling water is a little big difficult (although most summertime solar water heating panels will hit that and blow off from time to time) but getting to 150° to boil Trichlorotrifluoroethane is really easy.
So, again, all you have to do is build some type of turbine. (My favorite is a Tesla Turbine, because it is really easy to make for anyone who can use machine tools.)
You can probably get water hot enough, and keep it in a hot water storage tank to boil Trichlorotrifluoroethane through the night, for continuous power. Of course, it would probably be better and easier to use batteries for storage and surge power requirements.
Wave Energy
Wave energy has been well known, and the only problem is the "green peace" people. Who constantly shout about "protecting our coast", while doing far worse. (and usually paid for by BigOil)
People have been trying to work on small, and almost invisible alternatives. But what you really need is a great big paddle wheel. You need a paddle that is at least as large as a normal wave. And then you need a momentum arm to turn all that force into a spinning force. And since the wave is a large, but slow force, that should be along arm. Making the size of this paddle wheel about the size of a Ferris-wheel. In fact, you can probably put one right next to the other, and obscure all the "ugly".
This thing is really simple to build. We just have to work out various things about making it the best size, and strength to get the most out of it.
So which do you want "green" people? A big ugly eyesore of a wheel, or tons more coal burnt to keep the lights on?
Magnet Motor
The thing that will power most of the near future are magnet motors.
You remember those old, stodgy college professors who said that you can't have a perpetual motions machine? Well, they were wrong. You can place magnets in such a configuration where they spin until the magnets (or the bearings) wear out. (which makes it not a perpetual motion machine, technically)
These magnet motors exist. The only problem is they do not have much torque. Which means they cannot be just hooked up to your regular old genset. But this is really only an engineering issue. Like, you can replace the steel cage of the standard genset, with a copper one, thus reducing the torque requirements.
Also, someone may come up with a novel twist on magnet placement, and then make a magnet motor that has much more torque.
We should be spending money on this instead of dumping all that money down a hole over in U-crane and IsReal?
This is our real future. This is what we can do right now. And like i said at the beginning, this stuff isn't new. There is only a problem in that the current TPTshouldn'tB do not want this stuff to exist.
The first ones of these may need a bunch of anarachists to defend it from the authorities, while it is shown to the world.
The first ones may have to be built by "Satoshi Nakamoto", a person who gets the first ones built and then disappears.
We won't have "free-energy" devices until we will never use them for war. It is coming. They are really easy to make (as long as you understand aether physics, which means throwing away everything you learned in college science class) We don't need aliens explaining it to us. We just have to reach a level of mental integrity where we KNOW that having a war is the stupidest way to handle anything.
There is going to be a lot of fighting, suffering and problems in the near future, but we will also see new technologies come out that will make our world a better place.