OverUnity Does Not Exist!

[ramset]

SO NINK


Have you ever been to Florida?
I use Florida as am example because its the Lightning capitol of the planet.


if not well I'm sure you've heard about or seen lightning ?
do you believe in magic??


If you've never had the _PLeasure_ of walking thru a town and have a lightning bolt come out of the clear blue sky ,or been in a lightning storm where you actually feared for your life, Tree;s exploding, the concussion knocking you off your feet the hair standing up on your whole body The abject terror as one after the other Bolts explode with such force you are left stupefied and terrified  .


it would dawn on you that we actually do swim in a sea of energy,and nature on a regular basis will stabilize this Humongous machine in all manner of ways .


to assume that it would be completely "nuts" to think that we could harvest "free Energy" from this "sea of energy " is well
magic thinking
the kind of Magic that some would have you believe.


at the beginning of the last century we built a power plant with state of the art technology [Niagra falls]
at the same time we had guys running down the beach with sand between their toes
jumping into the air with fabric wings in the Carolina's {Wilbert and Orvil]


if you follow that time line,  Wilber and Orvil's leads to Comets and satellite landings


and electricity?  whats the state of_ that_ art along the same time line ?


lets take a walk into that  Niagra Power Plant
OH LOOK Its exactly the same ,why it looks just the way it did at the turn of the last Century,when we peaked inside while Orvil and Wilbur were running down the Beach
like Magic!!


do you believe in Magic NINK ??
I don't


thx
Chet

[MarkE]

Chet there is lots and lots of energy coming form the sun.  A good deal of that energy gets stored up in the atmosphere.  Some of that gets stored as separated charges and discharges as lightning.  Harnessing atmospheric discharges is particularly daunting:

The discharges are very random in location and strength.
The discharges have very high peak to average power ratios.

People have considered different options for trying to overcome these problems, but no technically viable solution has been proposed. 

In the meantime, a different way to harvest energy from the sun:  PV has advanced by leaps and bounds and the cost has fallen dramatically: 

http://www.internet-public-library.org/carbon-reduction/advanced-solar-cell-developments-2007.jpg

http://greenecon.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/price.jpg

The biggest challenges in energy are not generation.  They are storage and distribution.  In a Buckminster Fuller kind of world we would have solar plants and/or wind and/or tidal plants distributed at all longitudes and therefore able to supply power anywhere on the planet 24/7.

[Nink]

Chet,

I have no issue with harvesting available energy sources. I do have issues when people state that you can get more energy out of a closed system then goes into that system. Did you actually read my post?

By the way i lived in Palmerston Australia (near Darwin) for a couple of years where i experienced a massive number of dramatic lightening strikes due to the high concentration of  iron in the ground.  Also Florida is not the lightening capital of The world.  The world is bigger than the USA. The most lightening strikes occur in Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Please focus on facts and data.

[hoptoad]

I agree wholeheartedly with the premise of your opening statement. I've always seen the quest for OU as one where dreamers occasionally stumble across the newly possible as they search for the impossible. To me, the quest is an important one, simply because the journey itself is the path that leads to discovery. Each new failure in the search for OU still has the potential to provide some new insight into what can be possible in terms of energy conversion, storage and distribution.


I've never taken the title of this website literally. But over the years, I've been privileged to witness some great experimenters pushing the envelope in various ways and generously sharing their work and time.


If their is one particular OU that occurs here regularly, it is Over exhUberance.!

[Nink]

@MarkE I agree, the renewable energy sources we have on earth are a result of external factors outside of our planet.  The Sun is responible for creating Wind that drive turbines,  Waves that move salter ducks, Brine that produces Osmotic,  Solar that feeds PVs, rain that drives Hydro etc  Even the creation of tidal energy like in the Bay of Fundy is the result of the moons gravitational force.

The problem as you clearly stated is not just the creation of energy from the renewable sources it is the storage and transportation.  I have been doing some research and experiments on super capacitors for energy storage and I have had some success in low cost creation of super capacitors using natural processes (Graphite and Green Tea) that I beleive can be easily replicated at a large scale. I think this type of research should help with capturing our energy at the time of creation but it doesn't resolve our long term storage issues. I was involved in some lithium air research a while ago and lithium salt water and Lithium Graphene also show a lot of promise for stoarge but I do not see either of these as environmentally friendly or sustainable options. 

How we get that energy from the point of creation to the area it is used is another real challenge that needs to be resolved.  I beleive the energy harvesting systems need to be directly built into the products and associated systems that use them.  The simplest example is the solar powered calculator on my desk.

@hoptoad great post and I agree the enthusiasm of community is electric. Now if we can only capture the energy generated from that enthusasm we would be one step closer to acheiving the mythical state of OU  :-)