Thoughts and Theories From Roger Andre
for the curious, and people getting to grips with computing and computers.
Friday 29 August 2008, 8:56 PM
Energy Utopia Shows A Practical Face.The Time's Ripe For A Power Harvest.
Capturing electricity by way of recovering vibrational type energy is known as piezoe electric energy.
This kind of energy, as we already know, is all around us all of the time and it's there for the taking. At the moment, there is a mass roll out going on for things like traffic monitoring devices (oh joy).
Another technique for capturing spare, and otherwise wasted energy is known as pyroe electric energy. This harvests energy
from high temperature sources and is stable up to 1200 degrees. This could be a superb way of catpuring what I would hope to be a great percentage, and a significant amount of all that energy that escapes into the air from industrial process.
The grand idea at the moment is grow the ability to capture the spare energy from nearly everything. It could be from sounds around us, the roar of jet aircraft taking off and landing, a voice, spare heat from rocks cooling down after a sunny day, furniture being moved around,tectonic plates, you get the drift, absolutely everything!
There has been talk of course of smaller scale devices that can use extrmely small amounts of power, but what sruck me, was the fact that there are ideas being towted around, that suggest enough energy could be harvested to allow collection in central distribution stations, there being possibly billions of miniture power stations feeding into a grid. I guess all these micro amounts would add up to a fairly respectable amount of available power. All free of course (ha ha).
Lets just hope that the earth with it s awsome natural system doesn't have its own designs on all this dissipating energy. Although I think we should be OK in this regard. There are some very real and high hopes for releasing the burden on our very finite and possibly almost redundant resourses.
I've posted a couple of addresses below for those who wish to know more on this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_harvesting
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5009358.stm
PreviousComments on this post
Sorry, but there is no such thing as a free lunch!
A pyro device will slightly cool down the surroundings by its very operation. One device in a wash of waste heat won't make much difference, but put a thousand or two in and all you do is burn more expensive fossil fuel to drive the so-called free heat reclamation.
Similarly a road piezo device gets its energy by vibrations created by the use of fuel, so as soon as you use too many all you'll end up doing is burn more fuel.
The idea of using billions of these devices to feed the electricity grid is so not a good idea - the whole point of a conventional power station is that it uses economies of scale. It is reasonably efficient because it does stuff en masse, which helps to reduce the effects of the fixed losses involved.
Billions of electrical connections that weren't there before will cost energy to manufacture, more energy to install, and then by their effects on the original source of the power will then cost lots more fuel to service than just building a few more power stations would cost.
I did wonder about more life being drained from our fuel tanks etc.
They definitly think they're onto something though, I mean why would they bother at all. Something to keep an eye on me thinks.
