Scientists May Have Discovered How To Extract Power From the Earth's Rotation (scientificamerican.com)
- Reference: 0176854147
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/03/29/0536241/scientists-may-have-discovered-how-to-extract-power-from-the-earths-rotation
- Source link: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-earths-rotation-be-a-power-source-physicists-debate-bold-new-idea/
> No more burning fossil fuels, playing with fissile material, damming rivers, erecting wind mills, or making solar panels. All of our energy needs could potentially be supplied by the angular kinetic energy of the Earth — and because of the mass of the planet, doing so would slow its rotation down by a mere 7ms per century. [Which is similar to speed changes [2]caused by natural phenomena such as the Moon's pull and changing dynamics inside the planet's core."]
>
> Normally this would be considered impossible as the Earth's large and uniform field does not induce a current in conductors, but [3]researchers believe that a hollow cylinder of manganese, zinc and iron can alter the interaction with our planetary magnetic field and allow the extraction of energy from it. So far, the results are positive but still below the level where they cannot be explained by multiple possible causes of experimental error. Further research is required to confirm the effect.
"The effect was identified only in a carefully crafted device and generated just 17 microvolts," [4] reports Scientific American , "a fraction of the voltage released when a single neuron fires — making it hard to verify that some other effect isn't causing the observations."
But if another group can verify the results, the experiment's lead says the next logical step is trying to scale up the device to generate a useful amount of energy.
[1] https://www.slashdot.org/~Baron_Yam
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00932-w
[3] https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.7.013285
[4] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-earths-rotation-be-a-power-source-physicists-debate-bold-new-idea/
Need equation of manufacturer energy vs energy gen (Score:2)
(Energy needed to mine raw resources, manufacture and produce the machine) divided by (energy generated by the machine)
How much more efficient will the machine need to be to get this ratio so that the energy payback time is less than 15 years?
How Big? (Score:3)
Did I miss it, or does the article give no indication at all of how big this contrivance would have to be in order to produce useful amounts of electricity?
Re:How Big? (Score:5, Informative)
It looks like the approximately 30 cm length and 1 cm outer radius cylinder produces up to 50 microvolts and 60 nA or 3 picowatts if I'm reading the article correctly? So to power a 12W LED light bulb you would need to build 1.2 million km of cylinders. I don't know if you can scale up the size of the cylinders, but let's say you can chain them together to increase the voltage and current. If you built a 200m tall power plant full of them, you could stack 20,000 cylinders. If the building was 600m wide, then you could have 60,000 cylinders wide, and the building would be 1km long. So you would need a 1000m x 600m x 200m size power plant that would likely cost billions of dollars to build to power a single LED light bulb... Actually larger to account for space for more than the cylinders. Obviously the building would need lighting, so it wouldn't even produce enough power for itself.
For the example of charging a cell phone that someone else posted, you would probably want about twice that (24W). So two power plants to charge a cell phone.
Obviously they hope their research leads to advancements in scalability. It seems more likely to me that the experiment won't be repeatable and some other interference was the cause of their results, but this is not my area of expertise.
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It did sound like you could reduce some dimensions without losing capacity and you could change the performance using improved materials. The way they talk at the end suggest they see it as only generating small 'battery' like performance. Still given the simplicity of the solution it should not take long for other to confirm, or refute, their findings and to experiment with scaling up to see if it is a real source of energy and an if it can be implement in a practical way.
If it does work I suspect it
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Now, now, don't be skeptical. People are always publishing their world-changing research in Scientific American .
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It's published in Physical Review Research:
[1]https://journals.aps.org/prres... [aps.org]
That comes with lots of scary math and a lot less imagination though.
[1] https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.7.013285
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I saw elsewhere that a large cylinder produced a few microvolts.
17 microvolts for 7ms (Score:4, Funny)
Anything more would instantly stop the rotation.
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All of our energy needs could potentially be supplied by the angular kinetic energy of the Earth — and because of the mass of the planet, doing so would slow its rotation down by a mere 7ms per century.
Reading is hard?
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> Anything more would instantly stop the rotation.
So, the equivalent of regenerative braking with the earth's rotation.
More Free Energy BS. (Score:4, Funny)
"Scientific American" is an oxymoron now, probably.
Re:More Free Energy BS. (Score:5, Funny)
Considering the path the US is on, they'll soon be reporting on why electrolytes are what plants crave.
I don't think the grandparent has a fair assessmen (Score:3)
This is a classic case of a news article hyping up something that's just a research project. It's not like it's actually going into production or anything. You get that a lot with scientist communication where stuff is blown way way out of proportion so the public will put their eyes on it.
Realistically wind and solar can pretty easily meet our energy needs if we would put the effort into building it out but there's a wide variety of political reasons that's not happening at the pace it should be
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Solar and wind are great, I have solar and wind is a work in progress. You left out hydro which current provides most of my country's power. However you still want to have a base load with tidal and and geothermal being my favorites. Some people may see this research as a base load option but it looks like it would not scale up to grid levels of power. If they can prove it is a real option it is still likely to be a niche power source.
So yea, safe investment options now are solar and wind. The more s
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It's not even American now, having been in German ownership since 1986.
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They are not claiming 'free energy', they are claiming the energy comes from slowing the rotation of the planet. The biggest problem is the tiny amount of voltage generated could be from 'noise' such as RF or the AC power grid. The good news is the experiment should be easy to reproduce so we should soon know if their maths stacks up. It does also look like you would need a lot of materials and space to generate just a few watts so it is unlikely to be magic solution to energy problems. So even if does
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Anything claiming barely-detectable results based on an until-now-we-thought-this-was-impossible mechanism sounds like wishful thinking to me.
Remember the [1]EmDrive [wikipedia.org]? Or the [2]E-Cat [wikipedia.org]? If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer
Not just bullshit. (Score:2)
Respected physicists appear divided, but it hasn't been reproduced yet, so caution is advised. This is physics not psychology, science not pseudoscience.
“The idea is somewhat counter-intuitive and has been argued since Faraday,” says Paul Thomas, an emeritus physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. But the experiments, led by Christopher Chyba, a physicist at Princeton University in New Jersey, are very carefully done, he adds. “I find it very convincing a
Heard this before (Score:2)
Isn't the ancient aliens crowd into theories like this one? That lunar tidal energy or rotational energy of the Earth (or both) provided limitless clean power to some past civlization(s)? And that Tesla was on the verge of figuring it out for himself but got shut down by people like Westinghouse?
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Shhhshhh. You might suddenly generate have an urge to jump from the window (of a tall building)
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Da, tovarische
Interesting (Score:2)
I'm glad I actually skimmed the article before posting, as I drew an inference from the summary that just wasn't true.
A neat idea, if they can make it practical, but I didn't see anywhere they mentioned the size of the apparatus to generate this result. How long would it take, I wonder, for the cost of building it to pencil out?
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From my skim of it it looks it looks like they see it as only generating small amounts of power, watts, even when scaled up. While it looks like each tube could be made physically small you would still need to series them up, around 10,000 to 100,000 tubes, before you would get enough voltage to be able to use common semiconductors to operate a boost converter. So I see this as being a niche option, assuming it is a real effect, not just a bad experiment.
Have a pretty good idea (Score:2)
Who will be awarded the contract for this.
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Boeing, I hear they are good at collect contracts funds.
One of my favorite moments in Doctor who (Score:3)
Was from an episode where humans were doing something horrible to get energy and by the end of the episode they had the stop doing it because it was horrible and there was a major crisis brewing because humanity would lose its energy and the doctor, Tom Baker at the time, just casually tell a scientist the solution was to draw energy from the movement of planets clearly starting him on the right path and solving the crisis before it starts.
Yet another invention reified from science fiction (Score:2)
Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_ had a main character named John Galt who invents an electric motor for Twentieth-Century Motorcar Company that is powered by the Earth's rotation (instead of by batteries and instead of by hydrogen-oxygen fuel-cells and instead of by hydrocarbon fuel-cells). Perhaps soon we will have a volume-hologram clock and a volume-hologram calendar projected above each metropolitan area, which also was an element of science fiction in _Atlas Shrugged_.
Oh horseshit (Score:1)
I can make a zillion volt source from sufficiently many potatoes too. 'cept it'll disappear the moment I try to pull any current from it.
Similarly, the earth's magnetic field will simply deflect around the gizmo the moment you try to draw any power from it instead of just claiming success with an open loop voltage.
Great Idea! (Score:2)
What could possibly go wrong?
Future Dupe. (Score:2)
Will likely be reposted April 1.
Nikola Tesla knew the answer (Score:2)
According to history Tesla created a car that would run on earths magnetic fields, so he already had a way to use it, but sadly this got locked away by the oilindustry and its friends.
But (Score:3)
we already extract much power from the Earth's rotation, which contributes lots of energy to the winds.
Always some new load of crap (Score:3)
I appreciate the thought experiment along with space elevators, rocket packs, and Tesla's 1900s vision of powered electronics via airwaves but the isssue is and always has been, you dont get something for nothing.
TANSTAAFL (Score:1)
Right, so you're reading my post, and the last thing you want to read is what a scientist is. I've put that last.
If the earth's rotation was used to extract a useful amount of energy, that would mean that the Earth's inertial mass' rotation was converted to another form that we can use -- let's posit electricity. In doing so, that energy is MOVED from the earth's rotational mass to that electric bank (and let's pretend it's 100% efficient so we can avoid another mindfuck.)
That necessary REMOVES that energ
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TBF, Earth has enough rotational kinetic energy to supply our global 2022 energy usage rate for... on the order of 3 quadrillion years. Or thereabouts.
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We already get energy from the earth's rotation. where do you think tidal energy comes from, for example?
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Uhm, you did read the bit " All of our energy needs could potentially be supplied by the angular kinetic energy of the Earth — and because of the mass of the planet, doing so would slow its rotation down by a mere 7ms per century . [Which is similar to speed changes caused by natural phenomena such as the Moon's pull and changing dynamics inside the planet's core."] " ?
They are claiming their maths shows getting energy this way would slow the planet but not by enough that it would be an issue.
What
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That's a whole lot of text, including the "I'm not the math science guy" and a bunch of irrelevant ranting just to poorly restate something that's in the summary.
We found the people ... (Score:2)
... responsible for the earthquake in Myanmar.
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry - I'm guilty on that one.
I noticed that the discussion forum on the European Seismic centre (https://www.emsc-csem.org/) had been quiet for a while, so I prodded it in the side to see if it was still alive. Almost immediately afterwards - quake.
Sorry, my bad.
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But to return to the point - this is producing approximately enough energy to titillate a gnat's crotchet. If it's not producing a calibration error in the measurement equipment. What the actual power is - somewhere in the picowatts. There is likely to be more power released by electrochemical reactions between pore fluids on the fault and any metal salts deposited on the fault plane.
Remember the NASA "warp drive" which 5 years work failed to replicate. I do. Colour me unimpressed.
Angular Momentum (Score:1)
what are we going to spin to conserve angular momentum?
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Like you, I’m having great difficulty understanding any of it. Assuming it isn’t complete pseudoscience, I presume an easterly force must act from “the planet” (ground, building, physics lab) to “the experiment” (cylinder with iron zinc etc), conserving both linear and angular momentum. Acting over a distance (40000 km per day at the equator) this force does work (per unit time) or instantaneous power (as a continuous process). The angular kinetic energy of the planet is
This tech already exits (Score:1)
You could probably derive power from a large Foucalt pendulum appropriately made and in a vacuum. It would also generate a tiny amount of power, especially at one rotation per day.
It's called "tidal energy" (Score:4, Insightful)
Tidal energy is partly Earth's rotation energy because tides are caused by the gravitational pull of the Moon acting on Earth's oceans, while Earth rotates beneath that bulge.
The friction from ocean movement and tidal drag slows Earth's spin very slightly, transferring rotational energy into the motion of water. Tidal power plants capture that water movement—so they’re extracting energy from Earth’s rotation.
Low energy density = expensive (Score:2)
Great, instead of erecting wind mills or making solar panels, weâ(TM)ll just build this even bigger and more expensive thing.
Don't do it (Score:1)
it will slow down the Earth's rotation.
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Just what we need. Longer days. I can see how the billionaires will rejoice at the extra "efficiency" to be extracted from their slaves...I mean "employees" ;).
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Just what we need. Longer nights. I can see how the billionaires will bewail the extra "INefficiency" to be extracted from their slaves...I mean "employees" ;).
Night follows day as ... well, night follows day.
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This is exactly what I was going to say. There is no such thing as free energy. If we're harvesting energy from earth's rotation then that means we're slowing the rotation. There is no such thing as free energy. Even wind power could potentially be affecting weather patterns from the energy it is pulling out of winds. Solar is probably the closest thing to free energy because that energy has been expended by the sun, if we capture and use it or just leave it uncaptured makes no difference.
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This is exactly what tidal energy is. The energy comes from the Earth's rotation. The difference is, that energy is already getting extracted and used to move the ocean around. Turbines in the ocean skim off a little of the energy along the way. In this case they claim to be doing it more directly.
I'm skeptical it would actually work, but even if it did, the amount of energy we could extract would probably be tiny compared to the amount already flowing into the ocean every day.