Is Free Energy Or Electricity Possible? PMAs or Cosmic Rays can free energy be done

[ethergeek 0]

Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles won't become popular untill you can refill them everywhere you want. It's nice that the FCX comes with a hydrogen manufacture system ... but what use is it if you're 500miles away from your garage and the fueltank is empty?

That's a problem for taking it on road trips, but I was more or less only addressing in-city commuters with that one. I have a 20 mile drive each way, M-F, to get to and from work. I have a 12 gallon tank and have to gas up every week, around $30 a pop. That's about $120 a month. Even if the system that came with the FCX added $100 bucks or so a month to my home natural gas bill...it's still a savings, especially timewise. Going to the gas station is a pain in the *bottom*.
For road trips, I'll take my old fashioned gasoline V8 engine...nothing quite like the feeling of flying down the I-10 at 140 MPH with that nervous-as-fsck eye on my fuzzbuster
Edited January 4, 2008 by ethergeek (see edit history)

[Skepticus 0]

I'd like to weigh in on this debate. I didn't vote though, because there were possible options that were left out of the list of answers. Also the question "Is Free Energy Or Electricity Possible?" itself is ambiguous. What does the word "free" mean? Also the phrase "Energy Or Electricity" is a bit like 'animals and dogs' it's redundant. There are several concepts which need to be refined here and the question needs division into two separate ones which have very different lines of inquiry.

 

If by 'free' we mean financially free as in 'free beer' yes there are vested interests in this socio-political landscape which will try and make it hard for any competitive technology to steal their markets, but hey, that's free enterprise.

 

If by 'free' we mean over unity or perpetual motion, then you can count on it being a hopeless cause. As an eight year old boy, I heard about perpetual motion and bugged my father and brother mercilessly, to consider every new design I would scratch out on the back of an envelope and when they pointed out that the design would succumb to friction and 'wind down' I would tenaciously set about designing a new model, ignoring their emphatic caveat that 'you can't get something for nothing'. As an eight year old boy I simply didn't understand the fundamental inevitability of natural laws such as law of conservation and the second law of thermodynamics. I just naively guessed that nobody had yet thought up a way to make a perpetual motion machine and went on ignoring that friction would cause energy to be lost and that one of my designs would overcome the problem. I drew such diagrams as a vacuum cleaner (hose connected to the 'blow end') driving a turbine coupled to a generator that made electricity to run the vacuum cleaner. But no end of cobbled together, Heath Robinson contraptions failed to impress my father and brother.

 

The real problem, was that I wasn't trying to solve the problem at all. I was ignoring the problem, because I simply didn't understand the laws of thermodynamics. I didn't see how they were inevitable and how perpetual motion is simply an impossible idea. You can't get more energy out of a system than you put in. That's as final as any law of nature gets. What I was doing was just submitting guesses one after the other to my father and brother and asking them "here will this one do it?" They never even had to look at my diagram to know that it would not "do it", and only did so to humor me. Eventually I think I lost interest and busied my self with more fruitful endeavors.

 

It is no use thinking or hoping that there may be a way to get around the the conservation law, just because it would be convenient either. What motivates a scientist to consider reevaluating a scientific principal, is not wishful thinking, "well it would be nice if we could violate that energy conservation law, then we could manufacture all the energy we want". No a scientist recognizing that the law is watertight and intimately intertwined with the many other laws of nature, will say that such a law must stay put, until evidence gives us pause to reconsider it. If there were an anomaly in the maths or perhaps some experimental evidence coming in to suggest that we may have a discrepancy to explain, then quite rightfully scientists should go back to the drawing board and try to explain the anomaly. If it turns out that the second law or the law of conservation needs revision, believe you me, the up shot would be at least as great as the revolution that followed in the wake of Einsteins relativity. Sir Arthur Eddington, in regard to the second law of thermodynamics stated the same dilemma thus:

The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations â then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation â well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation. â Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

It is all very well if somebody such as Dennis Lee had revised the laws of energy conservation and thermodynamics or taken his marvelous invention to a physics lab and just said "why don't you guys test this and let's discover how it works". The influence of the oil companies, might sway some R&D dollars to put a particular car off the road, because they wont subsidize the research voluntarily (which is of course their prerogative and we can hardly call this foul play), but I seriously doubt they could influence even a small minority of physicists to give up the glory and wonderment of re-defining the laws of nature as we know them. The Lee story as I recall, involves alleged death threats (attempts) and know I read it somewhere that he was jailed for attempted murder, which he claims he was framed for by big oil. It would make far more sense that he was jailed for fraud and that the claim of being framed for murder, is another whitewash. The attempt to cover up such a discovery, is betrayed by it's import to our fundamental understanding of nature. Such a treasured gem is of much more importance than our parochial energy needs.

 

Even the big oil companies know that new energy sources and technology are essential and far from suppressing them in some insidious conspiracy, many of them seem to be investing in them. Honestly why would a huge fuel company who's current product is in limited supply, try to suppress the alternative and secure their own extinction, when instead, they could invest in R&D of these emerging technologies and ensure their survival. Big oil already has the market for fuel. If I was in their shoes I would want to be in on the marketing of what ever fuels are going to replace fossil fuels. The demise of fossil fuels is inevitable, what is not inevitable is that big oil companies will have to go out of business. They will have to invest in new fuel sources to stay alive or diversify into unrelated areas. But when fossil fuel is exhausted somebody will inevitably be making money from whatever takes it's place. The product has to change, that is just a physical and inevitable fact of nature, but the corporate entities who supply the new product do not have to change. They know that the market for one product will become the market for another and they already hold the market for the former fuel. Why would they cut their nose off to spite their face, by conducting a global conspiracy to shut down any technology that they could invest in to secure their future market?

 

The fraudulent claims emanating from the likes of Dennis Lee, expect us to believe tall stories that are implausible on two fronts. That obviously infallible laws of nature are being violated, and without showing their workings for how this could be so, and the other is that, a global conspiracy involving commercial interests and even scientific community are out to get them. I love my science because I love to understand nature, and no amount of money could keep me from presenting to the world, an equation that explained the law, which permitted an over unity machine to exist. But that is not the end of the story.

 

There is something of a confabulation going on here. As I said free energy machines that we call perpetual motion or over unity, are blatant violations of the law of nature, but harvesting energy from the environment is not the same thing. If you can harvest energy from the environment which has cost you nothing financially, then you don't actually have free energy in the sense of a machine which produces more energy than it consumes. The pseudo-scientific claims of over unity devices are not the same as finding cheap (or even free) efficient sources of fuel and harvesting them. In the latter case, this is exactly what we have been doing all along. All forms of fuel that we uses are in some way or another taken from our environment. Solar Coal and Oil are all environmental sources as are wind geothermal and OTEC. The more interesting ones are cheap and renewable and have a have a lower impact on the carbon cycle as well as other environmental factors. When people talk about 'free energy' it is important to make this distinction. Are we talking about energy in the environment, that we don't have to pay money for, or energy produced by an over unity device and as such materializes from nowhere? It's two separate things. Let's be clear, the chances of discovering a method to create over unity, is right up there with pixies in the bottom of your garden.

 

How about fuel sources that are free to harvest for little or no cost financially? Of course why not, and we do that already. Solar is a great example. OK, the cells may be expensive and inefficient at the moment but they have improved to the degree that they have become a viable alternative, especially now that you can install systems that feed the surplus energy they produce beck into the grid for credit. Now you can back up the solar with grid power and offset the cost of grid power when you have more solar than you need. The cells may be expensive but the do last along time and they are harvesting free energy, that is the solar cells may not be free but the energy they harvest is. I don't know much about the environmental impact of manufacturing the solar cell, but I trust they are getting better with that.

 

The solar cell however is not the only way to harvest solar energy. Even way before the advent of the photo electric cell, there were so called 'sterling cycle' engines, for which a low grade source of heat (such as magnified sunlight) can be used to power them. They do work, but again they put out very low amounts of usable energy. The main problem with these kinds of designs, is that they are impractical for large scale usage such as a power plant for a city or to drive a vehicle. Surely we may suggest, 'these are just matters of design improvement' (I sometimes think that myself). But some designs are just intrinsically limited. The bigger you make them the harder it is to harvest energy to drive them.

 

What we are really making with these devices, are energy converters rather than generators or power stations. An engine uses one kind of energy, to deliver another. In the internal combustion engine it is a volatile fuel (which stores chemical energy), that is converted into angular momentum that drives the wheels of your car. In a hydro electric plant, it is angular momentum (produced at the turbine) that becomes electricity. Actually we could go back another stage and recognize that nature converts solar power (by evaporating water) into kinetic energy and then precipitation releases that kinetic energy as rain some of which falls over mountains and makes it way into rivers that flow down hill to the sea, we borrow some of that kinetic energy and convert it to angular momentum that is used to drive generators.

 

There is nothing wrong with looking towards these alternative, but less conventional methods of converting one form of energy into another. There may certainly be potential design improvements and better designs, I have had a fascination for alternative energy for years. I have an idea for using capillary action in large ocean based hydro farms. Thousands of kilometers of rigid double walls sandwiching some kind of wick, would lift water to a head using capillary action. On top of the wall a perspex capping protudes in the shape (looking at the cross section) of the playing card suit spades.

 

The capping forms a chamber, which acts as a hot house, that uses solar energy to continuously evaporate the water from the wick which is enclosed by the capping. The water precipitates on contact with the perspex and trickles down the angled inside walls. The two walls curve into the bottom 'lobes' that provide a gutter for the watter to run into. on one end of the wall is a box containing a turbine and a generator (or an alternator) to produce electricity from the water flowing through it. A bonus, is that the water coming out can also be harvested as it is naturally desalinated. Instead of costing giga watts to desalinate water (as we are planning to do here in south Australia) we could produce electricity and desalinated water at the same time. The problem is again probably the scale and the viable amount of energy produced. It might not provide energy and fresh water for a city, but perhaps it could be scaled up to to provide for a small live away aquaculture community, who could live on a decommissioned ship mored to a decommissioned oil rig and the 'hydro wall' would also serve to fortress their aqua farm from poachers.

 

I have a couple more alternative energy ideas, but I am probably well over the credits I need to get hosted and that means I have a job to do. So I'll see you all in the soup.

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

ummm... thanks for the huge blocks of text, but can you please give us a summary for those like me who don't have the tension span to read that ... lol, sorry.As per cold fusion, it is a long way until we find a solution to produce it, and currently, even the Sun can't do it. It'll be great if we could do hot fusion locally to provide energy, but we can't, only something as big as the Sun can.xboxrulz

[wutske 0]

I've recently read something in the newspaper about a new way to generate energy to make hydrogen. They would use the temperature difference between the ocean's water surface and a few meters below (the temperature difference can be up to 20°) to 'move' gasses that would drive some generators. Too bad it ain't free either, building a complete 100MW power station (including H20 -> H2 + O2 convertor) would costs about 500-600 milion .

[faulty.lee 0]

I've heard that Nicola Tesla created something similar to a solar panel that could producefree electricity from the cosmic rays that run rampant throughout our universe.

If the generation of energy involved inputing of certain matters/wave/particle, then it's not free energy. The solar panel to produce electricity from cosmic rays, it's similar to the normal solar panel, which relies on solar energy. Cosmic rays is also a kind of energy by itself. If that can be considered free energy, then free energy is everywhere. Solar, hydro power, nuclear and so on so forth.

[morphious69 0]

firstly I would like to create a distinction between over unity and perpetual motion. basics of the two is that the latter does not have to produce extra power and in fact if not all of the extra power is extracted from the former then it will destroy itself thus ending the possibility of being perpetual.

Now about the permanent magnet idea.

every design I have seen has ignored the fact that moving a magnet past another magnet requires the same amount of energy as it will generate once it is past the resistance of that magnet. so how would one get past that? Eliminate the initial resistance that exists by moving it away until the other is past the resistance field. this would create a sort of effect much like say a person riding a bicycle and the hills he rides up or down are flat until he is at the area of which the top exists then to have the hill rise so he can coast down and out over the flat area next to another said hill. It is an idea I am going to attempt at some time in the near future using old waste hard drives to supply my materials.

and on another note if one is interested in something very easy to build and supply say light to cut down those electric bills try looking into the flapper technology.
I believe the official term is windbelt and here are a few links

http://www.reuk.co.uk/Windbelt-Cheap-Micro-Wind-Generator.htm
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

I honestly believe this is the easiest to build electric generator and with basic electronics knowledge you can even power an entire house while using then generators to make say a fence (that is a friend's idea so I can't claim credit there)

just so you understand magnets are not producing their pull magically from nothing but instead are simply aligning a lot of some sort of background energy on a specific frequency thus the reason they only effect similar materials (you can read up more on how each atom has frequencies it responds to and how it "ignores", or is transparent to, others by going here (bose-Einsteinum condesation site) which by the way is probably how true cold fusion will be accomplished

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

what really makes me wonder is if there are other forms of material attraction that if one but has the frequency maybe a magnet for aluminum r other materials could be made? this I think would be a far more important discovery than even over unity as this might give us the control over materials to allow for manufacturing technics that would rival what we are led to see in say even star trek shows. there are more things I could write about but I think I am getting of topic so I will leave with this one final thought. Who cares is the free energy device you make will power a city? just take care of your power needs and let others do the same. if you can get free or "green" energy for your needs then you have removed your self from the burden that society currently places on our ecology. If you want to do more then write photograph and document your success so others can at least mimic you. and Luxeon's all the way!!!!

[docduke 0]

Nuclear power is a limited resource, but the limit is very high. Wikipedia puts it at 1500 years. It presents a chart of it here, and cites an internationally-recognized study (pdf).

 

Solar cells are also becoming much more efficient. The Department of Energy last December reported 40%-efficient solar cells. The trick is to "tune" individual components of the solar cell for different wavelengths in the solar flux. Nanotech allows dense packing of these tuned components.

[docduke 0]

If I can rephrase the objective of this topic, consider "unlimited energy" as an objective. I just ran across the description of a method that is currently being scaled up to produce a lot of oil products (gasoline and deisel) from organic waste. I find it interesting because of the possibility to scale it down and provide household, or individual community, sources of fuel.

 

The article I ran across has the headline: Anything that grows 'can convert into oil'. The inventor is J.C. Bell. He has a website under construction. (Just the home page.) His invention is very simple, yet profound.

 

Cows can eat almost anything that comes from plant life. From it, they generate a lot of methane. In fact, they generate so much methane that it contributes significantly to the hydrocarbons in the atmosphere. The implication of the article is that he has engineered stomach bacteria from cows so that they produce chain hydrocarbons.

 

The objective is that one can take waste food, grass clippings, agricultural residue such as cornstalks, and any other organic residue, and persuade the bacteria to convert these things into oil products. His view is that he should be able to scale this technology up to provide for the oil needs of the U.S. To me, what makes even more sense is to scale the technology down so that every home, or if the chemical processing is complex, every community can have a facility that will be able to convert waste products into useful fuel. It can even reduce the amount of waste that goes into the local dump.

 

From the environmental point of view, it is carbon-neutral. It neither adds nor removes carbon from the environment. It simply converts waste into fuel. From an energy point of view, it converts sunlight (which grew the plants) into chain hydrocarbons, which can be used for whatever oil is used for.

 

Sounds like a win-win idea. The energy isn't free, because it requires work to do the processing, but it offers the prospect of producing usable fuel at low cost, and recycle waste in the process!

[Mordent 0]

I'll admit, it's stories and breakthroughs like this that make me wonder if I should have followed the biology/chemistry route instead of the physics/electronics one that I'm currently working my way down. I'm not going to comment on the science of the idea - as I'm horribly inexperienced in the fields needed - but the economic impact and implications of that process are colossal. On the scaling sense of things, I understand docduke's thoughts about scaling the process down to make it usable by households/communities, but surely having dedicated plants where the process takes place would be far more effective? The way I see it, a vast majority of an organic product is wasted before it reaches our homes: unused plant material from a crop; in the areas where the raw foodstuff is processed, and so on.

 

Once this sort of thing has hit industry in general (making J.C.Bell ridiculously rich in the process, of course ), and I'd imagine the sort of financial backing the process will get will be more than enough to make that pretty rapidly should it turn out to be a success, and the effects seen I'd imagine more localised and smaller (whether that be citywide plants or household waste processors) will certainly be the next step.

 

Regardless, this sort of discovery could well be one that does indeed change the world as we know it. Well within my lifetime the energy crisis will be sorted one way or the other, so here's to it ending up with mankind finally producing its own fuel!

[docduke 0]

Mordent, your skills will still be in demand. It has been said that the last person who knew most of everything worth knowing was Leonardo da Vinci. In today's world, really useful things are done by groups of people. J.C.Bell's invention will require lots of electronics to make it work.I am interested in the potential for scaling it down rather than up to (1) compress timescales and (2) make it harder for governments to regulate. If there is one thing that has been obvious since the first oil shock in the 1970's, it is that we need to diversify our energy sources, yet government is still standing in the way of nuclear and other potential sources. I read recently that there are of order 25 applications for new coal plants, yet most were put on hold by the power companies when Congress dropped a "carbon sequestration" bill in the hopper. Those coal plants, much less nuclear plants, require 5-10 years to build. I could (in principle) put up a fermentation plant in my back yard in a week. Developing a uranium mine takes 3-5 years. Doubling the number of microbes in a fermentation tank is an overnight process.Big business, especially big energy business, is often in the crosshairs of Congress. We feel their bite in things like our cars, when they are built by big businesses. If each community or even each household had slightly different versions of energy production plants, it would make mischevious regulation much more difficult. It would also allow designers to quickly determine which of the different designs was most productive.

[mikesoft 0]

I read something on shoutwire about a guy who created a lamp powered by gravity, and nothing else... gravity is something that we get for free and if we can turn that into electricity or energy then... well, here's the link

http://www.shoutwire.com/

It is very annoying when in the most unexpected time the light bulb in your lamp passes out. If you do not have a spare one, you would be left with no choice but take it from other lamp in your house, or go shopping. But what if the lamp's lifetime will be around 200 years? Or let's think of another problem that comes along with light bulbs; its energy consumption. However, imagine that a 200 year lifespan lamp that needs no electricity to run. You probably thought that this is unbelievable and such a bulb does not exist. But it is real!
Student from the Virginia Tech University has made an interesting concept that has already won the Greener Gadget award. The LED lamp that uses the most infinite energy source possible - the Earth gravity! The lamp, called Gravia, is about four feet tall, and it looks like a tube made from glass. Ten built-in LEDs are powered up by energy, produced by the movement of weight that slowly lowers. Just as an old grandfathers clock that needs to be rewind to operate, this weight must be raised up every day. Sounds like a hassle, but thinking of its 200-year lifespan and absolutely no electricity drain it seems like a good idea. No wonder that it won the Greener Gadget award, because it is hard to think of any more "green" sources of energy than this one.

If it is ever mass-produced, we will possibly be the observers of a death of usual light bulbs market. Of course, why do you buy a usual lamp that needs to be replaced every half of a year when there is a lamp that will operate more time than you ever live? But the question is will the mechanism endure such challenge?

[morphious69 0]

ok that last post is most annoying (not the poster but the person who claims the light runs off of gravity. instead of running off of gravity it is running off of stored kinetic energy, and once again gravity is merely the means of extracting the energy. how ever it does raise the question of a "Cell" like a solar Cell that instead of light is agitated simply by the passage of gravity though it thus having it positioned right to maximize the potential is all that it would need and potentially could be buried under a house to protect it from the elements, vandalism and any other threat that might shorten it's life span. also such a device would most likely not be diminished noticeably if another stack were placed over it (unlike a solar cell) so an entire stack could be boxed and placed under a chair or couch or any other such item in an apartment. Any ideas on what sort of materials that could be used?

[morphious69 0]

I was introduced to an energy idea that was a reintroduction to a part of chemistry class. anyone here done the distillation of wood with the result most important being the extraction of methanol? if so do you remember the tank with liquid to measure the gas that could not be condensed and if so did your class ignite this gas? it is mostly hydrogen and thus has given me enough input from experience to realize that a method called

Wood gasification, is a very believable process to replace gasoline for ones engine with out a ton of costly and continually draining work. basically you just put a pressure cooker on your vehicle with limited air intake start a fire and let it burn down to coals. the base to the unit allows the coals to fall through and then you lay on top of the grate and close it up. very quickly the heat from the coals cause the wood above to break down and the gases that result are pumped to your carburetor or fuel injector, and the gas burns just like gasoline or even better. ofcourse all of this requires adjustment so unless you can adjust a vehicle you may want to get some help with it but apparently it works well enough to allow it to replace as much space as the gas tank on a normal vehicle with only a marginal excess of space and a very small amount of wood will allow the vehicle to drive a long way while producing the same or less emissions that are regulated.

here are some links on the subject. (also dont forget one could be set up on a property and used to run a generator for electricity too.)


http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ -20222/gengas/monorator-eng .html
http://www.motherearthnews.com/ /Green-Transportation/1981-09-01/Wood-Gas-Update.aspx
http://www.intergate.com/ ~mlarosa/images/woodgas/?M=D
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ _alexandersson.htm
http://www.gengas.nu/bilder/ /index.shtml
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ -20222/gengas/kg_eng.html
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ _recovery/3_alternate_energy /woodgas/fema_wood_gas_generato r.pdf

Edited April 2, 2008 by morphious69 (see edit history)

[levimage 0]

I don't think no one has mentioned it but I've seen cars drive around (Volswagon bugs/Volvos) that have a modified engine that run on the contents of grease traps from fast food places. I'm not sure what's all involved.It seems energy has to come from somewhere. Converting energy from one source to another with minimum energy loss in the process (from heat, friction, energy efficiency, etc.) I've had some energy producing ideas before but I'm no inventor. It seems all the best ideas thought of were bought by government agencies or energy/oil companies cause of new breakthrough in technology - which may alter their financial/regulatory/authority stability. There are technologies developed which the general public will never even hear of.Well one of my ideas since we get light from the sun. And we know the speed of light. We need to create some sort of artificial material which can slow down the light yet still capture all it qualities. Then once we harness the light in this material we can then project this material among our prisms, mirrors, various lenses to whatever photosensitive energy producing material we have. Or have it reflect in permanent circle/sphere which can will provide illumination, heat, or other light frequencies which we may benefit from.

[Mordent 0]

...
Well one of my ideas since we get light from the sun. And we know the speed of light. We need to create some sort of artificial material which can slow down the light yet still capture all it qualities. Then once we harness the light in this material we can then project this material among our prisms, mirrors, various lenses to whatever photosensitive energy producing material we have. Or have it reflect in permanent circle/sphere which can will provide illumination, heat, or other light frequencies which we may benefit from.

The physics of that strikes me as dodgy at best. The idea of "storing" light by reflecting it around in a permanent circle/sphere is surely more of a "delaying" tactic? Let's say you work out a way of reflecting a beam of light in what is, effectively, a big hollow spherical mirror indefinitely. Getting the light out by opening a small part of the mirror would just cause the light beam to come out at the same rate it went in, surely? Assuming no energy is lost by reflecting it time after time, why not just have solar panels in the first place, or am I missing some key point to your idea?

Still, I think the idea of harnessing the Sun's energy (whether via solar panels of some description, or via mass usage of plant material to generate energy) in some form is the only way we're going to be able to sustain our energy levels for any real length of time. Plants are perhaps one of the best means of this idea, if not also due to the fact that they "recycle" the carbon in the process.