Free Energy
With the advent of the electric power shortage in California and other
parts of the United States. The topic of free energy has become of
great importance. Even though the power shortage is man-made, it is
nevertheless a very serious problem. Moreover, judging from the solutions
being offered to this problem, it will most assuredly become
worse--much worse.
It seems to me that the only workable long term solution is for some
13,000,000 Californians to become energy independent ASAP. That is,
for 13 million to start using free energy in one way or another.
Of course, this is the solution to the energy crisis in all of the
United States and in all countries.
What do we mean by free energy? In the case of electricity (electric
power) free energy means electric power produced without the consumption
of fuel such as gasoline, diesel, natural gas, fuel oil (in any of it's
various grades), or nuclear. That means the production of electric
power by solar, wind, water, or other means. We are, for various reasons,
especially interested in the "other means."
Before considering the "other means," it would be well to look at solar,
wind, and water. These each have their unique limitations which prevents
any of them from being a universal path to energy independence. The three
overriding limitations are availability, energy density, cost of
equipment.
Let us consider each of these limitations.
Availability simply means, in the case of solar, that the sun doesn't shine
all the time--so part of the day there is no solar power available.
Wind power has the same disadvantage. Not everyone lives on a river or
large enough year-around creek, but if you did you'd could have free
energy 24 hours a day 7 days a week 52 weeks per year. So, water power,
from the constancy standpoint is the most available.
Energy density means the amount of power available per square foot (really
per cubic foot, but collectors tend to be "flat"). In the case of solar
power the density is only about 1 KW per square meter at maximum sunlight.
Moreover, in higher latitudes (e.g. north of California) only 2 hours of
equivalent full sunlight per day are received during winter. In the case
of wind, the number of hours per day the wind blows is not a predictable.
Moreover the amount power per square meter of windmill surface may not be
much more than for solar. Regarding water power, the density of water is
hundreds of times that of air. This makes water power many
times more efficient than wind.
Both availability and energy density impact the cost of the equipment
needed to harness the power for our use. A typical free energy system
might look like the figure below.
source ---- regulator
---- battery bank ---- inverter
---- load
|
|
|
auxiliary source
The dashes represent the wires connecting the various components. The
source may be a solar panel (or bank of solar panels), a wind generator,
a water generator, or "other source." The regulator is necessary to
prevent the battery bank from becoming overcharged if the source should
supply more energy than used by the load. The battery bank stores
electricity for use when the source is not supplying enough to power the
load. The inverter converts the battery power (Direct Current) into
ordinary house current (Alternating Current). The load is all the lights
and appliances in the house that may be on at any given time. The
auxiliary source may be a gasoline, diesel, natural gas, or propane
fuelled generator needed for situations when power is not available from
the primary source.
Unfortunately, to power a normal house will require equipment costing
between $5,000 and $25,000 (or more). Suppose you could get by with a
$5,000 system and you currently pay $50 per month for electricity. If
the equipment required no maintenance, it would take 8 years and
4 months to pay for the equipment.
You may wonder why the equipment costs so much. The simple answer is
that we use so much electricity (KWH). Second, we like to run
so many appliances at once (peak KW).
Many of our appliances are not very energy efficient--we use
incandescent light bulbs instead of fluorescent lights. We like our frost
free refrigerators. We have electric heaters and air conditioners.
Roughly speaking if you can cut your demand in half, you can cut
the system cost in half.
What about "other sources?" It is about this energy that I address
in the remainder of this epistle.
We live in a three-dimensional world and because that is all we can
observe we tend to think that that is all there is to it. Actually, there
is at least one other dimension--time. We observe
mass, for example, but actually mass exists as masstime. When we
observe masstime, the observation process strips off the time (which
is not observable). When we observe an object (masstime) the
observation is made up of a series of snapshots of the masstime.
Much like a "motion picture" is made up of a series of still
photographs flashed on the screen in rapid succession.
Just as mass actually exists as masstime, so space exists as spacetime.
And, just as masstime cannot be observed directly neither can spacetime.
Although we cannot observe it, spacetime is seething with energy--so
we are surrounded by tremendous amounts of energy.
How can we use seething (unobservable) this energy in our 3-D world? It is
really very simple. Any electric or magnetic dipole (a battery, generator
or barmagnet, for example) warps the 3-D spacetime continuum and releases
energy from the unobservable spacetime into our 3-D world.. This is
where the energy actually comes
from when we connect a battery or generator to a load of some kind. But,
because of the way we build our circuits after energizing the load the
energy flows back to the battery or generator in such a way as to destroy
the electric dipole in the battery or generator. Thus, in our conventional
circuits, batteries "run down" and generators must continuously be supplied
with "fresh" power.
In most circuits, the load only captures a minuscule portion of the total
energy released from the spacetime. So, our circuits are not only
destructive of the "source" but also very inefficient.