Free Energy at last!

[Swiss Miss]

It's about time for some promising news in the energy industry:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060818...y_060818141011

Irish company challenges scientists to test 'free energy' technology

Fri Aug 18, 10:48 AM ET

An Irish company has thrown down the gauntlet to the worldwide scientific community to test a technology it has developed that it claims produces free energy.

The company, Steorn, says its discovery is based on the interaction of magnetic fields and allows the production of clean, free and constant energy -- a concept that challenges one of the basic rules of physics.

It claims the technology can be used to supply energy for virtually all devices, from mobile phones to cars.

Steorn issued its challenge through an advertisement in the Economist magazine this week quoting Ireland's Nobel prize-winning author George Bernard Shaw who said that "all great truths begin as blasphemies".

Sean McCarthy, Steorn's chief executive officer, said they had issued the challenge for 12 physicists to rigorously test the technology so it can be developed.

"What we have developed is a way to construct magnetic fields so that when you travel round the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position, you have gained energy," McCarthy said.

"The energy isn't being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet. It's literally created. Once the technology operates it provides a constant stream of clean energy," he told Ireland's RTE radio.

McCarthy said Steorn had not set out to develop the technology, but "it actually fell out of another project we were working on".

One of the basic principles of physics is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form.

McCarthy said a big obstacle to overcome was the disbelief that what they had developed was even possible.

"For the first six months that we looked at it we literally didn't believe it ourselves. Over the last three years it had been rigorously tested in our own laboratories, in independent laboratories and so on," he said.

"But we have been unable to get significant scientific interest in it. We have had scientists come in, test it and, off the record, they are quite happy to admit that it works.

"But for us to be able to commercialise this and put this into peoples' lives we need credible, academic validation in the public domain and hence the challenge," McCarthy said.

What remains sad is that this sort of technology will never see the light of day during my lifetime... call me a skeptic but I would love to be proven wrong.

[Martin]

Interesting....First time i've heard of this type of experiment.

Unfortunately, Our world wouldnt allow free energy.

[discombobulate]

Originally Posted by Martin

Interesting....First time i've heard of this type of experiment.

Unfortunately, Our world wouldnt allow free energy.

My first thought as well. Calling it free energy is just a way to gain interest.

Very interesting article though, keep us updated if you can please :)

[Sypher]

"But for us to be able to commercialise this and put this into peoples' lives we need credible, academic validation in the public domain and hence the challenge," McCarthy said.

"commercialise" doesn't sound free to me. If it's true it might be clean and unlimited but not free.

Isn't there speculation into magnetic fields causing cancer? Well I guess it would still be cleaner than current energy sources.

[RadioactiveMan]

It might cause cancer, but red wine can prevent cancer, can't it (or some heart thing... Like I care which :/). So all that you'd have to do it stay drunk as hell and you'd be perfectly healthy. Swiss is already half way there.

[Swiss Miss]

Originally Posted by Sypher

"commercialise" doesn't sound free to me. If it's true it might be clean and unlimited but not free.

By "commercialise", I believe McCarthy really means to just make it more known.

That being said though, it will take a lot of strong will for whomever poineers this new technology to give it up for free. Nothing in this world ever makes itself available without a price tag these days. Imagine if Al Gore had a patent on the Internet??... joke.

I am still skeptical whether this sort of technology will ever see the light of day and manages to become free but if it does that would be amazing. Why hasn't even solar energy become more widely used? It's the price of it that keeps the interest low and the other energy sources' bank accounts high!

Originally Posted by RadioactiveMan

It might cause cancer, but red wine can prevent cancer, can't it (or some heart thing... Like I care which :/). So all that you'd have to do it stay drunk as hell and you'd be perfectly healthy. Swiss is already half way there.

HERE HERE! I'll drink to that. :D

Is it possible to overload your body with antioxidents? You just got me thinking and I consume a good amount of red wine, pomegranate juice and green tea...

[Big Red 11]

I've heard of it and untill i see it I won't believe it. If the scientific community won't pay attention to it, it's not worth paying attention to myself. If this was truly what it claims to be, everyone would have heard of it by now.

Maybe not totally free but cheap (once its up and running) and can reduce our dependence on foreign oil...

Nuclear Power 'Renaissance' in USA
March 16, 2007, Nuclear power plant development, which came to a halt in the U.S. after the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, is making a comeback

The number of nuclear-powered generators in Texas could triple in the next decade with several new projects in the works. Expansions at the state's two existing plants — Comanche Peak south of Dallas and the South Texas Project near Bay City — took steps this past week when TXU Energy said it will likely buy two reactors from Mitsubishi for the Dallas-area expansion, and NRG Energy said it will work with a Tokyo utility as an adviser for two reactors at Bay City.

Illinois-based Exelon Energy has also said it is considering sites in South and East Texas for a new two-unit plant, while a private firm in Amarillo hopes to build two new nuclear units. About 14 percent of the state's power, or 4,800 megawatts, came from nuclear-powered units in 2006, according to state power grid operators. The proposed project could add 10,600 megawatts of nuclear power to the grid as early as 2015. One megawatt can power up to 800 homes.

"Texas is considered very hospitable toward nuclear," said Craig Nesbit, a spokesman for Exelon. "It's shaping up to be one of the key states for the next generation of nuclear power plants." Nuclear power plant development in the U.S. came to a halt shortly after the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania. The last new plant to start up was the Watts Bar facility in Tennessee, which began operating in May 1996 although it received its construction permit in 1973.

More http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4635953.html

Should at least be cheap if not free...

Solar thermal energy making a comeback
June 7, 2007, The first solar thermal project in years has cranked to life, and more will follow. Solar thermal technology, dormant for about 16 years, is waking up fast.

Nevada Solar One, a 64-megawatt power plant outside of Las Vegas, has begun to supply electric power to the grid, Acciona Solar Power, which owns and built the plant, said on Wednesday. The plant, which covers 400 acres, will generate 134 million kilowatt-hours of power a year. That's enough to power 15,000 households annually. (Sixty-four megawatts refers to the maximum power the plant can generate at any given time. Kilowatt-hours effectively refers to how much power gets delivered when measured over time.)

Acciona will sell electricity from the plant to Nevada Power Company and Sierra Pacific Power Company under long-term, fixed-rate contracts. Nevada Solar One is the first thermal power plant built in the world in 16 years. Other companies, however, are constructing similar and larger plants in California's Mojave Desert, where an existing solar thermal plant has been cranking out electricity for over 20 years, and elsewhere. Acciona has a project under way in its home country of Spain.

Solar thermal plants, also called concentrated solar power plants, harvest heat from the sun with highly polished mirrors. The mirrors concentrate the heat on a tube filled with liquid or gas. Pressure builds inside the tube, and the pressure is then exploited to crank a turbine. Heat is harvested by the mirrors. What can't be economically converted to electricity at the time it's obtained can be stored in molten salts at these plants. Thus, solar thermal plants are capable of generating electricity at night.

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Renewable not green?...

Renewable Energy Wrecks The Environment Says New Paper
24 July 2007 - Sounds like heresy, right? "Renewable and nuclear heresies" is the name of the paper written by Jesse Ausubel, Director, Program for the Human Environment for the Rockefeller University in New York.

Ausubel was one of the main organizers of the first UN World Climate Conference (Geneva, 1979), which substantially elevated the global warming issue on scientific and political agendas. During 1979-1981 he led the Climate Task of the Resources and Environment Program of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, near Vienna, Austria, an East-West think-tank created by the U.S. and Soviet academies of sciences. He's as green as it gets. And he says the focus on renewable energy is all wrong.

Renewable does not mean green, he states, and goes on to explain that building enough wind farms, damming enough rivers, and growing enough biomass to meet global energy demands will wreck the environment. Ausubel has analyzed the amount of energy that each so-called renewable source can produce in terms of Watts of power output per square meter of land disturbed. He also compares the destruction of nature by renewables with the demand for space of nuclear power. "Nuclear energy is green," he claims, "Considered in Watts per square meter, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors."

On this basis, he argues that technologies succeed when economies of scale form part of their evolution. No economies of scale benefit renewables. More renewable kilowatts require more land in a constant or even worsening ratio, because land good for wind, hydropower, biomass, or solar power may get used first. A consideration of each so-called renewable in turn, paints a grim picture of the environmental impact of renewables. Hypothetically flooding the entire province of Ontario, Canada, about 900,000 square km, with its entire 680,000 billion liters of rainfall, and storing it behind a 60 metre dam would only generate 80% of the total power output of Canada's 25 nuclear power stations, he explains. Put another way, each square kilometer of dammed land would provide the electricity for just 12 Canadians.

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