Scientists Who Turned Humid Air Into Potential Renewable Power Source Say 'It Was an Accident' (theguardian.com) 156
Remember those researchers who generated electricity from the energy in air humidity?
"To be frank, it was an accident," the study's lead author, Prof Jun Yao, tells the Guardian: "We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for humidity in the air. But for whatever reason, the student who was working on that forgot to plug in the power." The UMass Amherst team were surprised to find that the device, which comprised an array of microscopic tubes, or nanowires, was producing an electrical signal regardless. Each nanowire was less than one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, wide enough that an airborne water molecule could enter, but so narrow it would bump around inside the tube. Each bump, the team realised, lent the material a small charge, and as the frequency of bumps increased, one end of the tube became differently charged from the other. "So it's really like a battery," says Yao. "You have a positive pull and a negative pull, and when you connect them the charge is going to flow..."
"The beauty is that the air is everywhere," says Yao. "Even though a thin sheet of the device gives out a very tiny amount of electricity or power, in principle, we can stack multiple layers in vertical space to increase the power." That's exactly what another team, Prof Svitlana Lyubchyk and her twin sons, Profs Andriy and Sergiy Lyubchyk, are trying to do. Svitlana Lyubchyk and Andriy are part of the Lisbon-based Catcher project, whose aim is "changing atmospheric humidity into renewable power", and along with Sergiy they have founded CascataChuva, a startup intended to commercialise the research... Catcher and related projects [received] nearly €5.5m (£4.7m) in funding from the European Innovation Council. The result is a thin grey disc measuring 4cm (1.5in) across. According to the Lyubchyks, one of these devices can generate a relatively modest 1.5 volts and 10 milliamps. However, 20,000 of them stacked into a washing machine-sized cube, they say, could generate 10 kilowatt hours of energy a day — roughly the consumption of an average UK household. Even more impressive: they plan to have a prototype ready for demonstration in 2024...
The Lyubchyks estimate that the levelised cost of energy — the average net present cost of electricity generation for a generator over its lifetime — from these devices will indeed be high at first, but by moving into mass production, they hope to lower it significantly, ultimately making this hygroelectric power competitive with solar and wind... The team accept that it may take years to optimise a prototype and scale up production, but if they're successful, the benefits are clear. Unlike solar or wind, hygroelectric generators could work day and night, indoors and out, and in many places.
Yao explains to the Guardian that "Lots of energy is stored in water molecules in the air. That's where we get the lightning effect during a thunderstorm.
"The existence of this type of energy isn't in doubt. It's about how we collect it."
Thanks to Slashdot reader j3x0n for sharing the article.
"To be frank, it was an accident," the study's lead author, Prof Jun Yao, tells the Guardian: "We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for humidity in the air. But for whatever reason, the student who was working on that forgot to plug in the power." The UMass Amherst team were surprised to find that the device, which comprised an array of microscopic tubes, or nanowires, was producing an electrical signal regardless. Each nanowire was less than one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, wide enough that an airborne water molecule could enter, but so narrow it would bump around inside the tube. Each bump, the team realised, lent the material a small charge, and as the frequency of bumps increased, one end of the tube became differently charged from the other. "So it's really like a battery," says Yao. "You have a positive pull and a negative pull, and when you connect them the charge is going to flow..."
"The beauty is that the air is everywhere," says Yao. "Even though a thin sheet of the device gives out a very tiny amount of electricity or power, in principle, we can stack multiple layers in vertical space to increase the power." That's exactly what another team, Prof Svitlana Lyubchyk and her twin sons, Profs Andriy and Sergiy Lyubchyk, are trying to do. Svitlana Lyubchyk and Andriy are part of the Lisbon-based Catcher project, whose aim is "changing atmospheric humidity into renewable power", and along with Sergiy they have founded CascataChuva, a startup intended to commercialise the research... Catcher and related projects [received] nearly €5.5m (£4.7m) in funding from the European Innovation Council. The result is a thin grey disc measuring 4cm (1.5in) across. According to the Lyubchyks, one of these devices can generate a relatively modest 1.5 volts and 10 milliamps. However, 20,000 of them stacked into a washing machine-sized cube, they say, could generate 10 kilowatt hours of energy a day — roughly the consumption of an average UK household. Even more impressive: they plan to have a prototype ready for demonstration in 2024...
The Lyubchyks estimate that the levelised cost of energy — the average net present cost of electricity generation for a generator over its lifetime — from these devices will indeed be high at first, but by moving into mass production, they hope to lower it significantly, ultimately making this hygroelectric power competitive with solar and wind... The team accept that it may take years to optimise a prototype and scale up production, but if they're successful, the benefits are clear. Unlike solar or wind, hygroelectric generators could work day and night, indoors and out, and in many places.
Yao explains to the Guardian that "Lots of energy is stored in water molecules in the air. That's where we get the lightning effect during a thunderstorm.
"The existence of this type of energy isn't in doubt. It's about how we collect it."
Thanks to Slashdot reader j3x0n for sharing the article.
Many groundbreaking discoveries are (Score:5, Insightful)
Accidents, that is.
Re: Many groundbreaking discoveries are (Score:5, Interesting)
Discoveries like these are the result of being outside of the box, while not realising you are outside of the box.
Re: Many groundbreaking discoveries are (Score:2, Insightful)
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Indeed, and with any luck when we deploy this at scale we can finally bring an end rainstorms!
It's not yet clear... (Score:2)
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Re:Many groundbreaking discoveries are (Score:4)
The greatest breakthroughs are not heralded by a resounding "Eureka!", but a bemused "Huh."
Re:Many groundbreaking discoveries are (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the full quote:
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka” but “That's funny...” —Isaac Asimov
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https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/5... [getyarn.io]
It also doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It also doesn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, 3W/m^2 is tiny compared to a photovoltaic cell at 200W/m^2.
But normally it costs energy to dehumidify the air. This could be a real game changer in humid states for that benefit alone.
Re: It also doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
$10 says it loses conversion efficiency with fouling by dust and mold growth.
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That might be fixable with UV light. Effective UV LEDs are now available that consume little power. You might still need to plug it in, but energy consumption would probably be much lower.
We really need to be pushing UV cleaning technology now that it has matured. As well as the harmful stuff that needs to be kept away from humans, we now have reasonably affordable an very safe 222nm UV lamps. 222nm is safe for human contact, but kills viruses.
Businesses could dramatically reduce staff sickness levels with
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Re: It also doesn't matter (Score:2)
You canâ(TM)t dehumidify the air for free, itâ(TM)s not a free energy device, itâ(TM)s something akin to a thermocouple, it needs a difference in air humidity and will generate a potential based on that. This is nothing new.
Once saturated or sufficiently oxidized, it will stop, for dehumidification you then need to quickly condense and move that water somewhere else which is where the cost lies.
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It's as if you can't generate free energy out of thin air? How unexpected...
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It's simple, you just have to reverse entropy.
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It's why windmills have never worked.
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Actually windmills don't generate energy out of thin air. They convert wind power into rotational energy.
Anyway, my comment was mostly ironic because as for using this to "dehumidify the air for free", "Once saturated or sufficiently oxidized, it will stop, for dehumidification you then need to quickly condense and move that water somewhere else which is where the cost lies.".
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The article says the electric current is "continuous" and if that is true then they've already solved the problem of condensing the water and draining it.
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Yes, 3W/m^2 is tiny compared to a photovoltaic cell at 200W/m^2.
But normally it costs energy to dehumidify the air. This could be a real game changer in humid states for that benefit alone.
Solar requires a direct line of sight to the sun, so power per surface is relevant. However, this new method should not be restricted to 2-D, so the restriction is by volume and not surface area.
it's 2-D still, just for another reason (Score:2)
You need to let that humid air in. I guess that in effect, it's effectively 2-D, stacked vertically
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sorry, a wrong term, I'm not a native speaker.
Not stacked - I meant oriented, but it's misleading anyway.
What's important is that in any 3-D arrangement, you'd need to force the air in, diminishing the overall efficiency.
With a 2-D layout, "wind catching" might be enough.
May not dehumidify (Score:3)
But normally it costs energy to dehumidify the air.
It's not clear that this does dehumidify air. It seems to essentially be a miniature, gas-based version of Lord Kelvin's thuderstorm [wikipedia.org] in which case it extracts energy from the movement of water molecules, not their condensation.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the people talking about using this as an alternative to hydro and solar are full of shit, because entropy wins every time.
Being able to extract electrical energy out of the air from the particle motion of water just makes it sound like such a device will saturate with water, or it'll need a "dry reservoir." And that's the catch. Once it's spent, it'll need to be recharged by baking off or ejecting the water somehow. Hence Yao referring to it as a battery.
If any re
Re: It also doesn't matter (Score:2)
Even if it is a battery, I'd be very interested in a renewable battery with long life, that can last 16-20 hours and can be "charged" or renewed during the day or whenever we have surplus power.
But given other responses, it's probably not a battery.
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Yes, 3W/m^2 is tiny compared to a photovoltaic cell at 200W/m^2.
Well its still in the "look at this shit" phase of development. The time when a technology potential is not really known. With that being said, I do wonder how much power can be extracted from a given volume of air. I suspect that you would be able to generate more power near a ocean shore than in a desert.
Until we explore the potential we won't know. Maybe eventually it can join wind, solar, and nuclear as a green answer to our power needs where practical.
Re:It also doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not one to put any stock in imagined future technological development, but this sounds incredibly foolish. Besides, it's not like a few people working on this is going to take anything away from existing tech. There is absolutely no reason not to pursue this.
The energy able to taken out of the system this way is tiny.
You could have said the same thing about photovoltaics for years after was discovered. It seems more than a little too early to dismiss outright.
This is not going to be have many practical applications at all.
Even if this never produces more than a very small amount of power, it's not hard to imagine places where, for example, a small battery would be incredibly useful, but difficult to replace. Who knows, maybe this will even turn out to easily scale up. Again, it's way too early to make these kinds of pronouncements.
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In this case, the paper itself gives upper bounds on the energy extraction which are just not impressive.
You have surprisingly high expectations. From the article:
The result is a thin grey disc measuring 4cm (1.5in) across. According to the Lyubchyks, one of these devices can generate a relatively modest 1.5 volts and 10 milliamps. However, 20,000 of them stacked into a washing machine-sized cube, they say, could generate 10 kilowatt hours of energy a day – roughly the consumption of an average UK household. Even more impressive: they plan to have a prototype ready for demonstration in 2024.
Even if they can only manage 10% of that in the same volume, that seems pretty damn impressive to me.
The more interesting point really was the one by Ichijo above in their comment that this tech could be used possibly to dehumidify locations without having to expend energy
This doesn't seem to be how the technology works. From what I can tell, it's not taking moisture out of the air, but stealing charge from moisture that passes through it. If this could passively harvest water from the air, the fact that it could also generate electricity would be an uninteresting footnote! The agricultural applications alone would
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Re:It also doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
You could have said the same thing about photovoltaics for years after was discovered. It seems more than a little too early to dismiss outright.
No you couldn't have. Light *is* energy, and the amount of energy in, say, sunlight, is very well known. It was known up-front that a tremendous amount of electrical energy could be harnessed via sunlight, even if initial photovoltaics were extremely inefficient and only harnessed a tiny percentage of that available energy.
In this case the energy potential is very small, as there is simply a very tiny amount of electrical / thermal potential that could be harnessed from ambient moisture in the air. We're talking at least two orders of magnitude less energy than sunlight per m^2 of surface area. Think about that for one brief moment. It would require over 200 times more surface area of this to generate the same amount of power as a solar panel. So if you had 26x26 feet of solar panels on your roof, it would take 1 square mile of surface of this material to generate the same energy.
And again, this isn't because this material is not at its maximum efficiency because it's a new discovery - that amount of energy simply doesn't exist in ambient moisture in the air in the first place. It cannot be, unless the air was superheated or something.
It's hard to think of a use case where solar, even with very brief exposure to sunlight, cannot outperform this new technology when we're talking 200 times the energy production over a given surface area.
That's not to say there won't be some novel use case for this. Maybe some low-power beacon relay or scientific instrument in the arctic where there's no sunlight for days during winter. However I bet the arctic air doesn't have enough humidity (and the temperatures would instantly result in freezing when contacting the membrane) for this to function. Perhaps it would be useful in some kind of dark underground setting to power some small sensor, etc.
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Ignoring the physical and historical nonsense for the moment, there is a serious flaw in your reasoning:
So if you had 26x26 feet of solar panels on your roof, it would take 1 square mile of surface of this material to generate the same energy.
I haven't checked your math because it doesn't matter. Unlike solar panels, these can be stacked. You can save a lot of space when you can fold things. For example, you have ~60,000 miles of blood vessels in your body.
It's hard to think of a use case where solar, even with very brief exposure to sunlight, cannot outperform this new technology when we're talking 200 times the energy production over a given surface area.
Researchers at the Catcher project claim that a washing machine-sized cube (made of of the 4cm disc-shaped units they have now) could generate 10 kilowatt hours of energy a day. They plan
Re: Preljminary Research Indicates (Score:2)
It's hard to think of a use case where solar, even with very brief exposure to sunlight, cannot outperform this new technology
Preliminary research indicates that this will outperform solar at night time. And in other dark sitiuations.
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Ya, back when solar panels were first envisioned, you'd be telling them to stop screwing around and work on better oil extraction processes. And way back when those jerks invents windmills loooong ago, you'd have be there tell them to stop screwing around and work on creating bigger horses.
1.5A and 10 mA is a lot (Score:2)
More than enough to run a clock with an analog dial, a smoke alarm, or a listening device.
Unless of course the magic nanotubes foul quickly with dust or other environmental contaminants. Then it's just a science fair curiosity.
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What is changing? (Score:5, Insightful)
For it to extract energy from a system, it must be changing *something*. So it runs on humid air, right? What is it doing to the air? How is the air different after being used by this device to generate electricity?
Is it just taking advantage of small fluctuations in energy density over a small area? If so, how could that possibly scale to the level they are talking about?
There must be some sort of energy gradient that this thing is taking advantage of, but of course the article doesn't describe it.
Anyone have any ideas?
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Yup. Conservation of energy says that if you build the scaled up 10kW version of this, the air coming out of it is going to be very, very cold.
Maybe this is an air-conditioner substitute for the summer months?
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Yup. Conservation of energy says that if you build the scaled up 10kW version of this, the air coming out of it is going to be very, very cold.
Probably more than cold enough to freeze water - and if so, there could be a big problem with scaling this up. As the volume increases, distributing sufficient heat energy throughout the volume of the 'battery' to prevent heating could be tough. But the air conditioning angle you mentioned could be a huge win if the heat flow can be managed effectively.
Re:What is changing? (Score:4, Informative)
Ahh, you already fell for the marketing bullshit. They're not talking about a 10kW version, but a 10kWh/day version, so that's 400W
But indeed, the question is what changes, and will it be possible to supply new air rapidly enough.
Re: What is changing? (Score:2)
I live in a row of houses. We have a max power per house of 240x32A = 7680W sustained, that I use for induction cooking. If we have 20 of those batteries in total in all houses in our row, we could very likely do almost everything without ever having a brown out, except cooking. For the peak load of cooking it will still be problematic to do that on batteries. But if we all have electric vehicles that are integrated in the grid, even that shouldn't be an issue.
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Power the AC with the humidity it gets rid of (Score:2)
Nothing is for free (Score:2)
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Okay Tucker, back under the rock for you.
Several questions (Score:2)
2) ok, how long do these microfibers last esp with pollution in the air? Seems like pollution would block these limiting lifetime.
3) can this work in a river or even lake or ocean? If so, waves and tides just became best friends.
but the water companies will claim you are using (Score:2)
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I don't think so. This is on the order of walking on the carpet with socks and touching batteries to charge them. Not a game changer.
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"This is on the order of walking on the carpet with socks and touching batteries to charge them."
I doubt that you can fit a couple of thousands walkers, their socks and carpets within a washing machine size.
And remember, no walking needed either.
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And it would be nice if we could simply
Re:Waiting for the research team to 'quietly' disa (Score:4, Interesting)
What environmentalists believe ... (Score:3)
"Environmentalists despise Nuclear power because it proves that most of their beliefs and assumptions are wrong."
Note that many environmentalists acknowledge their error and advocate for nuclear as part of an "all of the above solution" that replaces the dirtier with the cleaner in an iterative process.
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When major environmental groups changes their stance on nuclear power, I will change my sig. Until then, it stays...
Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore
https://www.politico.com/story... [politico.com]
The reality ... (Score:4, Interesting)
(1) Renewables are not a 100% solution yet.
(1a) No matter how hard you wish otherwise, it remains true.
(1b) No matter what you believe is "just around the corner", it remains true today.
(2) The preceding dictates that some other form of energy is needed as a bridge to renewables.
(3) Nuclear would be best but there are political issues.
(3a) Obviously stick to western designs, ignore Soviet stuff.
(4) The preceding forces continued use of fossil fuels.
(5) Renewables should replaced the dirtiest fossil fuels first.
(5a) Coal first.
(5b) Oil second.
(5c) Natural gas last.
(5d) Not acting in this order is suboptimal, likely political posturing.
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#define political "What to do with the very long-term, expensive-to-handle, extremely toxic waste"
The extremely toxic waste is fuel for modern designs, they will turn in into short term manageable waste.
Matter of fact these new designs help us cleanup our existing long term waste from previous designs. A bonus on top of power generation.
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Passive yes but they certainly didn't say anything about cheap...
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Passive yes but they certainly didn't say anything about cheap...
"Cheap" is both relative and contextual here. If production is environmentally friendly and has a low carbon footprint, (the context), then the power will cost a LOT less, (the relative part), than climate change, whose overdue bill has been externalized and repeatedly pushed into the future by corporations.
That's one of the problems of our economy - its functional abstractions get pushed to the double-think level where we somehow believe we can both have our cake and eat it too.
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"That's one of the problems of our economy"
The cheap that matters is fiscal. Otherwise it won't gain any momentum and even we just wrote a giant check for the future to cash the solution needs to be viable to replenish and maintain going forward.
Re:Waiting for the research team to 'quietly' disa (Score:5, Insightful)
How come solar and wind power companies are allowed to exist? Why did they start allowing EV vehicles?
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Fossil fuel companies do fight solar and wind power deployment and one of them bought and sat on the patent for NiMH-powered BEVs.
Re:Waiting for the research team to 'quietly' disa (Score:4, Insightful)
Fossil fuel companies do fight solar and wind power deployment
Quite the contrary actually. When you look at energy usages, you see that solar/wind have only been additive to existing energy sources.
Take Germany for instance (this is a good example, because this is one of the country that has so far bet the most on solar/wind): they went from having a capacity of ~85TW in 1990, based on baseload energy sources (coal, lignite, gas, nuclear), to having in 2022 ~150TW of renewables (with a load factor of ~30%, so the actual capacity is lower of course) and... 82TW of baseload capacity (coal, lignite, gas, and no nuclear because they decided to close the only low-carbon energy source they had). If you put yourself in the shoes of fossil fuel companies, what is not to like about that situation?
The real enemy of fossil fuels companies is nuclear. And you can see their lobbying is working, because they got the so-called greens/environmentalists to fight this battle for them. How ironic.
Just wait for the usual slashdot trolls to show up (amimojo, gweihir, thegarbz, and I'm sure I am forgetting a few) to see an example of their lobbying in action.
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Exactly. Fossil fuel companies get to transition to something that's easier than drilling and refining, relies on even more scarce materials than oil, produces equipment that MUST be replaced regularly and can not be recycle or reused meaningfully, that they can charge substantially more for, and that shields them from any kind of criticism. Plus on top of all of this they can deliver less power, less reliably, to customers that are more desperate.
"Green" energy is fantastic for fossil fuel companies and co
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How is capacity relevant? Germany went from 291 TWh production per year from coal and lignite in 2000 to 181 TWh in 2022, while increasing renewables from 40 TWh to 254 TWh. So coal use was substantially reduced. A fact you conveniently neglected to mention. Of course it was stupid to exit nuclear at the same time (170 TWh to 35 TWh) in the same time frame. But the big picture is something else: The investments in Germany and elsewhere brought prices of renewables down substantially by creating an economo
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Germany went from 291 TWh production per year from coal and lignite in 2000 to 181 TWh in 2022
Pardon me if I am not impressed by 20 years of deployment, and 500 billions invested in renewables, only to see the coal and lignite reduced by ~38% (using your numbers, I didn't verify them, but they look like the ones I remember too). Knowing that the first gains are the easiest, there is no way they can reduce coal/lignite usage by a much more significant amount. Oh wait, there is a way: rely on their neighbor nuclear plants instead. Which is what they are doing almost every day of the last 6 months for
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Fossil fuel companies do fight solar and wind power deployment.
No, no they don't. They run PR campaigns touting every single investment they make into Renewables. Yes this is all greenwashing but they also make money selling the gas to power the peaker plants that the Renewables require. A win-win for them, a loss for the rest of us.
Big energy is OK with fossil fuel or renewables (Score:2)
Fossil fuel companies do fight solar and wind power deployment.
No, no they don't. They run PR campaigns touting every single investment they make into Renewables. Yes this is all greenwashing but they also make money selling the gas to power the peaker plants that the Renewables require. A win-win for them, a loss for the rest of us.
Nope. It is not greenwashing. They are energy companies and they will make money off of fossil fuels or renewables as much as possible. If and when we reach that magic day where renewables can deliver on 100% of our needs, big energy will be behind the renewables and energy storage infrastructure. Big energy is merely recognizing we are at an early adopter stage, not a mass market stage. Their shift to renewable will occur when it is economically optimal.
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It seems they got to you too. I'll have you know sir, if it weren't for Big Energy, we'd have perpetual motion already! I read it on the internet, you see. It's real!
Big energy saved the whales (Score:2)
If it weren't for Big Energy ...
There would be no whales, we would have hunted them to extinction for oil :-)
Re:Waiting for the research team to 'quietly' disa (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course they will allow it. They will even encourage research about it. For the simple reason that as long as people believe there is a free meal possible when talking about energy, they will gladly keep burning oil while waiting for the next magic thing that is "right around the corner". The message is simple: keep burning oil, because cheap, passive and clean energy from is going to save us all in just a few years. And most people are more than willing to believe that, just because it would be too much for them to realize their lifestyle, or that of their kids, is going to change for the worse in the next years/decades, and it is all their fault.
Also, this is the same reason gas lobbies also lobby for solar/wind, and also fund anti-nuclear NGO: they know they can keep making money with solar/wind intermittency, while with nuclear their role is basically reduced to jack-shit. Just look at the last COP conferences, who were people cheering for solar: gas industries and lobbyists.
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... this is the same reason gas lobbies also lobby for solar/wind, and also fund anti-nuclear NGO: they know they can keep making money with solar/wind intermittency, while with nuclear their role is basically reduced to jack-shit. Just look at the last COP conferences, who were people cheering for solar: gas industries and lobbyists.
That may be most informative and insightful comment I've read on this topic - thanks for sharing it.
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Yes, the next magic thing is now nuclear. How long to get to the point that peak energy is handled by nuclear and natural gas is no longer required? 30 years, 50 years, or longer? The whole time natural gas peakers will be required.
While nuclear is a good idea, it is slow to deploy and is mostly good for base load, at least currently, and it is in the fossil fuel industries interest to make sure nuclear deployment is slow
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nuclear [...] is mostly good for base load, at least currently
Interestingly, France is using a load-following approach with its nuclear plants, and handling the peaks mostly with hydro and gas. This is why the capacity factor for nuclear in France is at ~70%, compared to the rest of the world where nuclear is at ~90%: they ramp their nuclear plants up and down depending on the planned load.
That said, this is why solar/wind and nuclear actually complement each other pretty well (along with hydro of course, but you need specific geological features for that), and why I
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They do not need to allow or disallow anything, like all other free energy devices it will die on its own merits but still maintain a cult following.
The technology being described isn't "free energy." It's a low-energy capture device made from expensive-to-make and fragile substances that probably won't sustain very well out in the real world. It transfers a modest amount of energy from the tiny kinetic movement of water droplets in humid air as they - in their random movements - bang into the walls of the material described. A very large, very dense cube of this material might produce a few kilo watt hours of juice in a steady enough way to be useful
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Nothing Ayn Rand has ever written has any value.
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I don't know. Her theme about famous posers being mostly dicks and rich girls being kinky seems fairly on point. I'm not sure I read The Fountainhead the same was as Rand worshippers though.
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Name a single company that has "gone broke" from "going woke".
As is typical of right-wing nonsense, the exact opposite is true. [rollingstone.com]
Re: Ayn Rand was right again (Score:2)
"The simple fact is that "going woke" is good for business"
Sales are down 24%, will never recover, they lost the number one position in beer sales, other brands also down, and they can't even move Bud Light inventory by giving it away.
Whereas traditional ad campaigns would be expected to increase sales, solidify the number one position in beer sales, and reduce the need for promotions to move inventory.
By all means, keep going with your genius marketing strategy.
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Sorry, kid, reality tells a very different story. Keep clinging that Bud Light example. It's the best you'll ever have and it's absolutely pathetic.
Sales are down 24%, will never recover
Oh, no! Sales of one brand of shitty beer are temporarily down! The overwhelming majority of their customers, 75%, clearly don't give a shit about your ridiculous culture war issue. The missing 25% of morons on the bandwagon will either come back once they've moved on to the next outrage or they'll be replaced by other people with really bad taste. Bud Lig
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Bud Light is not a company you retard.
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As I've shown, that claim is laughable. One brand temporarily lost ~25% of its customers. The company itself is doing better now than they were this same time last year. [macrotrends.net] LOL!
As I've also show, "going woke" is highly profitable. You bigots are a shrinking minority. You have no power and you know it
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False.
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No, I'm really not concerned about this "only rackets that are rackets" concept you're suggesting.
In your post, are you coyly referring to Buddhism and Taoism? Don't be shy, just call it out. They all typically start out fine conceptually and begin to suck once organized and corrupted, I promise. :)
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Where is the energy coming from exactly?
The sun.
If you have a gradient, you have potential. In this case, it's a moisture gradient. From the abstract: [nature.com]
We find the driving force behind this energy generation to be a self-maintained moisture gradient that forms within the film when the film is exposed to the humidity that is naturally present in air.
I don't particularly care for the loose language, but it was good enough for Nature. This article [indianexpress.com] gives a nice explanation for how that gradient is created:
The team built an electricity harvester based on this design. The device was made with a thin layer of material filled with nanopores. These nanopores would let water molecules pass from the upper part of the material to the lower part. But each pore would be so small that water molecules would bump into the pore’s edge as it passes through the thin layer.
Since the upper part of the layer would be bumped by many more charge-carrying molecules than the lower part, it would create a charge imbalance. This difference in charge between the upper and lower part would in effect, create a battery. This “battery” can run as long as there is humidity in the air.
Perpetual motion machine? (Score:2)
But it sounds like a perpetual motion machine is possible: have large sealed box with moist air, and these power-mining nano-tube gizmos could run forever, since they don't remove moisture. Even if they did, it could drip to the bottom of the box to be re-evaporated and reused for power.
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Like I said, the energy comes from the sun. It takes energy for the water to evaporate, you know.
We're not creating energy here, we're harvesting it.
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So imagine this.
You have a reservoir at say 90C. Inside this reservoir you place a sealed box containing this new device, with wires to extract the power to the outside, and air with say 50% humidity. The device starts extracting energy from the humidity, lowering humidity by condensing water, while providing power. However, the reservoir is at 90C, so heat leaks into the device, making the water evaporate, restoring the humidity to 50%. The device extracts more power, and so on and so forth.
This way you ha
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What am I missing?
A few things.
In your scenario, your reservoir will cool as it warms the box. The box is generating electricity to power [some unknown thing] which is warming as a result. The box, losing energy, is cooling. Eventually, the reservoir will cool to the point that it isn't able to vaporize the water and the cycle will stop. The second law doesn't really have anything to do with it.
The device starts extracting energy from the humidity, lowering humidity by condensing water
That isn't how this works. As I said in another post, if this material could passively condense water from the air, the fact tha
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The box is generating electricity to power [some unknown thing] which is warming as a result. The box, losing energy, is cooling.
You cannot do that. You need a hot reservoir and a cold reservoir to generate work from heat, and this only has a hot reservoir. That is what Kelvin's statement says. You cannot cool something without having a place to dump the excess heat, and if that reservoir is hotter than the place you take the heat from, it will require work to do so.
This looks to be 'stealing charge' from water vapor that pass through the device, bumping into the sides. Like rubbing a balloon on your head. Due to the shape, the result is a difference in charge between the upper and lower sides of the material.
That makes a lot more sense and does not violate the laws of thermodynamics. It will require a constant flow of air to replenish the charge. Thank you.
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It causes hurricanes to make a butterfly flap it's wings thousands of miles away.
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" Where is the energy coming from exactly? ", jeesus, it even explained that in the summary.
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...rides again!
Thanks for that - I'd never heard of it before. On good days I learn worthwhile stuff here, and this is one of those days...