Billion in Change

Really wish there were about a billion more people with his mindset in this world.

Me too. Fitness gym would be turn like a power plant on his generator innovation,(why not) which makes sense.

Fitness gyms like that would likely 'generate' more than power.

Well I for one am all for putting those overly ambitious people to work doing something semi useful or at least more so useful then hovering around me asking me why don't work faster anyway.

'I will be done when I am done so in the mean time why don't you go jump in your Gerbil wheel and run a few miles and recharge my phone and power my radio?'

I am not being negative. I like his philosophy. But.... the presentation did rather gloss over one or two minor problems.

Geothermal heat extraction is not free energy. The cost and resources used to drill the hole have to be factored in as does the life of the well. If you extract energy from a system that is currently in equilibrium then soon or later you deplete the system to the level where it is no longer viable. Current UK inner city geothermal projects have an anticipated life of 30 years. Payback on the drilling costs is marginal.

Unlimited "free" energy cures global warming? All energy used by humans is for heating or ultimately decays to heat. If you only solve the inefficiencies of converting the energy into a usable form you have only solved half of the problem. If "free" energy triples the total amount of energy used, then the amount of global heating is... oops!! This solution could do a great deal to reduce pollution, but it is not "free" enough to lift people out of poverty.

A barge which desalinates 1,000,000 gallons of water per day also generates 120 tones per day of salt. 1000 barges generate 43,800,000 tons of salt per year. How do you get rid of 43.8 million tons of salt without affecting the salinity and the ecology of where is is dumped?

Sub Saharan Africans live 1000 miles from the nearest sea coast. How do barges help solve their water shortages? If you don't have any water to clean up a machine for cleaning up water is not much use.

you took it further than I did. I stopped after doing a BTU calculation to turn 1000 gallons of water to steam. 13 million BTUS aren't coming from thin air. in the clip he states, "just add electricity"

this dude is a clown who aspires to be considered as "great". he had a good run on his energy drink ........all this save the poor is bunk.

If his ideals are true and sincere, i'd back up the guy.

http://news.stanford.edu/pr/00/000315rocks.html it isnt so easy

When the Arabian countries first started really using desalination plants, it turns out the residual salt was polluting the Red Sea at a rate that was killing fish, and altering the eco-systems. They were returning it directly into the sea. From what I have read, there is a conversion table that gives the ratio of water necessary to neutralize highly saline solutions, and it requires massive amounts of water or energy by injecting it into thermoclines that use ocean currents far below the surface to mix and recirculate the salty water. Maybe the salt could be used to trap solar energy? Maybe not pure enough.

How do you get rid of salt? Move it ashore into a nonfertile area unlikely to cause problems with drinking water source. Each time barge would be storing a volume of salt equivalent to a cube less than 5 meters on a side per day......

Perhaps develop new markets for it, such as used as a thermal mass filling interior walls in houses and other construction.....perhaps use large forms to mold functional items, chairs, tables etc.....oh, start some modern pyramids to rival the ancient ones, but constructed of salt.

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Oh wait, I know. Use it to pump down oil wells to force out more petroleum. I'm sure there are lots of corrosion/erosion consequences, but hopefully nothing insurmountable.

''Unlimited free energy cures global warming?''

AFAIK, the heat directly produced by burning fossil fuels and the decay of any useful output to heat is a miniscule amount of heat compared to the addition required for the temperature gains predicted.

....but even if I have messed that part up, using energy from things like solar (as long as you aren't putting collectors in orbit to catch energy that otherwise would not have hit earth), wind power, ocean power, hydroelectric, and geothermal (with a little delay for geothermal) does not add heat to the system that wasn't there already.

"Unlimited "free" energy cures global warming? All energy used by humans is for heating or ultimately decays to heat. If you only solve the inefficiencies of converting the energy into a usable form you have only solved half of the problem. If "free" energy triples the total amount of energy used, then the amount of global heating is... oops!! This solution could do a great deal to reduce pollution, but it is not "free" enough to lift people out of poverty."

I think your confusion her is your understanding of Global Warming/Climate Change. Global Warming is not "I made a fire and now the whole planet is hotter," Global warming is "We are releasing gasses into the atmosphere that reduce the efficiency of the planet radiating heat into space. This causes the planet to lose heat slower than we gain heat from the Sun, causing temperatures to rise, weather patterns to become 'more energetic' (stronger and more chaotic), and causes the polar ice caps to retreat. The retreating ice caps are a Big Deal because as they shrink, the newly exposed land/sea under where they were is now able to absorb heat from the Sun that was previously reflected back into space."

A 'greenhouse gas' we have a lot of control over is CO₂, we can lower global CO₂ levels by A) 'sequestering' carbon inside of plants, typically trees (trees can hold a LOT of carbon inside them, plus a tree does not die when winter comes, so the carbon STAYS sequestered) and B) reducing our reliance on fuel sources that 'liberate' previously sequestered carbon. Wood, Charcoal, Coal, Oil, Natural Gas; all of these fuels contain 'sequestered' carbon in different proportions, and have held the carbon 'sequestered' for different lengths of time. The 'fossil fuels' have collectively held a LOT of carbon sequestered for millions of years. The more we use Solar, Wind, Nuclear and Geothermal energy sources, the less reliant we are on the fossil fuels.

Nuclear can be safe, if done right. The 'problem' with Nuclear is that all the various Departments of Energy were pushing for risky Uranium reactors instead of the safer Thorium reactors. Not for efficiency, not for the relative sizes of the fuel supplies (Thorium is plentiful, it's a typical 'side product' of Tin mining), no, there was one and only one reason we as a planet lunged for Uranium instead of Thorium: You can make nuclear bombs out of Uranium, you can't do that with Thorium. In fact, tossing Uranium into a Thorium reactor 'degrades' the Uranium stock instead of 'enriching' it.

Hope this helps clear up some of your confusion.

You are taking a very simplistic view of global warming. Greenhouse gasses are only a single component in the mix. Unlimited "free" energy is the goal. Lets forget free for the moment, that myth has been exploded, and concentrate on unlimited. The nearest equivalent to any country having unlimited cheap energy today is Iceland. 90% of it's energy is renewable being produced by either hydroelectric or geothermal. As a result Iceland has the highest use per capita of energy in the world. 3 times the amount per head of the energy consumed by Americans, 20 times the amount of energy per head consumed by the world average (an average which includes all the developed energy hungry countries). Now I'll wave my magic wand and achieve the goal, everybody get to use the same amount of energy as the Icelanders, we are all on a level playing field. But now the effect of dissipated heat is no longer insignificant when compared to the effect of greenhouse gasses, it is on a par. So explain why you think that I don't understand the problem. I am just pointing out an aspect of the problem that you and most of the scientists studying the issue have yet to wake up to. As I stated, you are all concentrating on half of the problem.

^{(Statistics quoted from The World Bank. Current 2012)}

How do you think hydroelectric generators work?

Suppose you have a waterfall: a rate of water falling through a certain height every hour; you divert the water through a turbine and generate electricity; what do you think happens to the potential energy of the water if you just let it fall over the waterfall?

The geothermal example is even easier to understand.

I know how hydroelectric generators work, I spent the early part of my career building power stations, Coal fired, nuclear and hydro. Hydro power is only free if you ignore the cost of the generator and directing the water to it. In many cases you also have to construct a dam to capture the required head of water. Hydro power may be clean but it certainly is not free. Thinking of how many people have been displaced to construct various dams around the world you would be hard put to say that it does not affect the ecology and environment.

My point was to draw attention to the fallacy in your conclusion:

"But now the effect of dissipated heat is no longer insignificant"

However, the heat 'radiated into space' does not care if it was 'heat gained from Solar Radiation' or 'dissipated head from energy use,' heat is heat. If we are dissipating more heat from energy use, than we need to unsure the extra 'waste heat' does not build up, meaning we would need to have a slow reduction on greenhouse gases as energy usage goes up. The equation *IS* simple: ( [Heat Gain] - [Heat Loss] = [Heat Change] ) If Heat Change is positive we have warming, if Heat Change is negative we have cooling. I was pointing out the Greenhouse gases and CO₂ in particular, as being a factor we have a pretty good handle on controlling: if we reduce our use of carbon-based fuels, especially fossil fuels, we reduce the production of CO₂. If we promote the preservation of 'green spaces' and reforestation, we increase the sequestration of carbon, pulling more CO₂ out of the atmosphere. Less CO₂, more heat 'lost' to space, the global heat equation shifts closer to 'balanced.' And if it turns out that we end up shifting too far, we can always clear-cut a section of 'new forest' and burn it to put the CO₂ back into the air.

Besides, how would you expect society to function while drastically reducing energy consumption? The massive file servers that store all the information on the internet run 24/7, with several redundant copies of everything. Many of those 'server farms are designed around a 'shipping crate' motif: when a 'shipping crate' loaded with racks and racks of servers and routers gets enough 'dead nodes' within it to drop its efficiency below the threshold set by the owning company, the crate is disconnected from the farm, pulled out by crane, and a new crate full of fresh equipment is lowered into place and hooked up. These server farms generate enough waste heat to match or even exceed that of the heat generated by Sears Tower⁽¹⁾, and that heat needs to be dealt with or the server racks will all 'cook' and fail. So the server farms have HUGE A/C systems to 'move the heat outside,' and those consume even MORE power and produce MORE heat trying to keep the servers running? Should the Internet only be available for an hour a day, to keep energy usage down? What about telecommunications? Broadcast, cable and satellite communication is a constant energy drain, perhaps we should cut back on that: only three television stations and two radio stations per region; and they only operate from sunup to sundown.

Energy usage per capita is not just the people using more energy, it's the INFRASTRUCTURE using more energy. This is a Connected Planet now, for good or for ill. The people aren't the ones using most of the energy, it's the 'machines' that make the modern world possible that use the energy. Even trying to go back to 1985 would cause riots as if someone was demanding that we all go back to living in caves and wearing raw animal skins. Let's face it, some doors, once opened, can never be closed, we just have to find ways to make sure that the equations come close to balance after the new variables are added.

Notes:

1. I was born and raised in Chicago, and that has always been the Sears Tower, and it will always BE the Sears Tower. Sears Tower, Wrigley Field, Comiskey Park, the ruins that used to be Soldier Field and are now a UFO crash site.
   

"As a result Iceland has the highest use per capita of energy in the world."

While I agree with you that when something useful is free more of it will get used, I wonder if that one of the reason's Iceland has a higher per capita energy use may have to do with how cold it is there. Some other questions that come to mind:

• How much of that energy goes to heat housing?
• In extremely cold climates does the cost of heating significantly impact the size of individual's houses? (i.e. Do Icelanders build larger houses because it's not costly to heat them....or if the cost of heating was 3-20 times higher, would Icelanders reduce their dwelling sizes?)
• How does Iceland's per capita energy consumption compare with countries having similar climates (Canada, Finland, etc.)?
  

All Nordic countries insulate their houses to an extremely high standard, a skill they learned long before central heating was ever thought of. There is no need to use a lot of energy to heat homes. Canada is roughly on a par with the USA (about 3% higher per capita) which is less than half what the Islanders consume. Finland, Norway and Sweden all use less energy per head than the US but not by much. Norway has enough hydro power to be totally energy self sufficient and has a surplus that it exports to Denmark and Germany. If they didn't need fuel for transport they wouldn't need any of the vast quantities of oil they produce. They do use some natural gas for district heating. Oil is considered in Norway to be "nasty, dirty , black stuff only fit for earning foreign revenue." Consumer energy prices in Nordic countries are greatly influenced by high levels of tax. Vat and energy tax in Denmark 57%, Sweden 42%, Finland 24%, Norway 33%(skewed by relatively low taxes on electricity but massive taxes on petrol and diesel). As an example motorists in Norway pay three times as much for their petrol as motorists in USA (where only 12% is tax). In developed countries energy prices and therefore energy consumption are more influenced by each country's government attitudes and tax rates than by production economics.

You don"t think their energy usage has something to do with heating their homes.....? It is Iceland.

Wait, am I missing something here? If you continually pile up the salt out of the oceans without putting it back then you are eventually going to desalinate the ocean. Seems the ocean ecology would be destroyed or greatly modified.

If the water never returns to the ocean then I guess you really don't need the salt for it. But is that realistic?

Water recycles doesn't it. Was taught that since grade school.

Straighten me out if I seem to have this wrong. Thanks.

Eventually - it's an issue of rates, location, and process.

Returning the salt is done on an economy of scale (a lot at once in a concentrated area). Whereas as the water that is removed goes back into potable use post treatment and doesn't necessary get returned to the ocean. Generally its return is through evaporation or uses that places the water in the storm water system rather than the sanitary system.

Regardless - the rate of returns for both are neither equal nor integrated into some normalized ratio, thus the imbalance.

years and years of river inflow and evaporation, the salt content of the lake water built up to the present levels. The same process made the seas salty. Rivers carry dissolved salts to the ocean. Waterevaporates from the oceans to fall again as rain and to feed the rivers, but the salts remain in the ocean

Great Indian Philosopher.

Fantastic video. Thanks for sharing.

That was my thoughts too. The guy did actually go out and accomplish something pretty amazing and in return for his good fortune he has been putting in an above and beyond effort into giving back to the part of the world that needs it the most in whatever way makes sense to him.

He may be a billionaire but he is trying to put 99% of his wealth back into the world rather than using it to buy up any and every other possible company and process he can get his hands on just to be come even wealthier for no real purpose other than to satisfy his own ego and nothing else like so many other billionaires have done and still do.

I thought I would post a comment. I'm just not sure if I would need to start another thread.

I saw the video, and it made me think about the waste salt. I have some questions :

1. Where to put the salt ?

2. How much would it cost ( transportation, fuel, emissions ) to move the salt ?

3. If the salt was dumped into a pit, should the pit have an enclosed membrane or a permeable membrane ?

4. Can water with a high salt content migrate into the surrounding strata and how much salt or time is required before the strata becomes saturated ?

5. Can saturated strata loop back into the source area and cause undesirable effects ?

6. Can an aquifer that is saturated eventually clean itself or is it permanently altered ?