(Cross-posted at Ezra's)
The problems facing us in the future when it comes to - broadly speaking - energy production and consumption are myriad, and the sheer size and number of them can make us desperate for solutions. This is not, however, an excuse for hucksters preying on the credulous. So it's with some trepidation that I see an Irish company (Steorn) is hawking an electrical generator that they claim produces energy from nothing.
(Thanks for the link, Theo!)When your main marketing gimmick is to proudly claim your invention violates one of the fundamental laws of the universe (conservation of mass and energy) then the audience has an obligation to set our skepticism to 11. Mark Frauenfelder, at BoingBoing, has what I think is about the appropriate reaction:
Check out this video, not for an explanation of how the technology works ...but for the ways the [sic] use a variety of emotional tricks to sucker people into believing in it.
The company's credo is a George Bernard Shaw quote: "All great truths begin as blasphemies." But I'm sure Shaw would also agree that the overwhelming majority of blasphemies that go against bedrock principles of science are utter bullshit.
Just to be clear, if this turns out to be legit I'll recant, apologize, and cheer when the guys at Steorn get the well-deserved Nobel. But considering the website has exactly zero explanation for their claims, consider me unimpressed.
A less sinister, but I think equally unlikely idea came up a while ago from an interview in MIT's Technology Review, where one Jefferson Tester (who's been working on this idea for more than three decades, judging by his website) claims that geothermal energy could provide all of our energy needs in perpetuity. Tester's interview with MIT got a bit of play with the DailyKos crowd, as well as my other hangout, Gristmill.
On the surface, nothing he says is overt BS, as with Steorn. Indeed, a lot of what he says is quite right - the amount of geothermal energy available to us at great depths is fantastic, and only a small portion would be needed to drive all human industry. Better yet - unlike, say, oil - all that is required is to dig a deep hole anywhere.
Problems arise when translating this to real life. Tester's own work (a 1997 article, here in PDF) indicates that a single plant would only continue to operate for about 20 years, after which point the source rock would cool too much, and be useless (for generation) for "less than" 200 years. A 20-year deadline is a bit short to finance high-capital cost plants, and (while I continue to welcome correction) I find it hard to believe that these plants could be built cheap.
Meanwhile, Matthew Yglesias finds a far more mundane piece of geothermal technology appealing - effectively, geothermal heat pumps are pipes filled with water (or possibly air) buried about 6 feet deep, where the ground stays the same temperature year-round. Cools the air in the summer, warms it in the winter, and dramatically reduces the energy required to cool and heat the home.
This is kind of frustrating for me, as geothermal heat pumps were being proposed, oh, thirty years ago, as a way to reduce energy use. I can literally go to my bookshelf and find authors who, during the oil shocks of the 1970s, were advocating low-tech alternatives like heat pumps and solar water heaters. Not to slander higher-tech alternatives like photovoltaic cells or lithium-ion batteries, but solutions come in all shapes and sizes. We may well need all of them, but we really need to avoid wasting resources on dead ends.
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