What Is Your Idea For Alternative Energy?

I find it kind of ironic that you would bring this process up and you live in Honeydew, CA.

It's just kind of funny to me because the company that makes those portable toilets you see at the fairs or construction sites are made by a company of that name and they call those honey buckets.

This could be a great idea! The way that plumbing is constructed in your home is by venting all the sewer pipes up through the roof. this is to alow the sewer gas to escape as well as give an air vent to the flow of sewer water going down the pipe. All the drains have a P trap in them that fill with water to not allow the sewer gas to come into your home. this means that you have methane gas already at your disposal coming out those vent pipes on your roof all we have to do is figure out how to trap this and use it as fuel to run most anything.

Flywheel vs battery as overnight storage device for solar energy...
Flywheel is maybe easier to manufacture and less poluting?

Discus....

I seem to recall flywheels being used experimentally in some urban vehicles as short term energy storage by using dynamic braking to drive flywheel then using flywheel to assist in acceleration.

A stationary location flywheel with extremely low friction bearings should be able to transfer a lot of energy into a charger which in turn recharges a vehicular battery. Since solar panels create DC power what kind of DC motor has a wide speed range to spin the flywheel? I have experimented with the 400Hz motors used to spin up the gyroscope compasses but these do not look like being suitable. Would a DC to AC high frequency converter be efficienct enough to be effective.

I have a 12V DC to 400Hz @24V converter. Would simply scaling it up for more power be sufficient? Some of the large ship's gyros ( now an older and obsolete design) had flywheels weighing close to a ton. Lots of stored energy there.

I have something on the drawing board; a motor that can develop thousand times the torque, or the same amount of torque as a current electric motor but weighing a thousand times less.

Guest wrote: . . . .the same amount of torque as a current electric motor but weighing a thousand times less.

. . . . . And??? . . . . . . are you going to tell us, or is this yet another one of these "if you make me a millionaire; I will share my secret with you, .... maybe!"

I thought the idea was to share our knowledge to make a better future not create a forum for get rich quick scam promoters?

it's credible El Nav. What are you? I forget your story.

what original inventions do you have that you can share with us with no compensation?

That's a Canadian flag you have alongside your avatar

REPLY: Hey guest, why don't you register and show your true colours?

Who says a phony avatar like yours is showing your true colors? You were friendly all week, now you changed and you are getting hostile. Believe me I invented a breakthrough Electric motor. I can show you a quote from Tom Netzel a former President of the American Chemical Society. He reviewed a nanotech invention of mine and he swore on paper it will change the world. Navigate to the nanoelectronics page on http://vulvox.tripod.com Last week there was a breakthrough lithium battery that holds ten times the poower of regular batteries. I have an old grant application to NYSERDA proving I innvented it first, a couple of years ago.

Flywheels on automobiles have been demonstrated with mixed results. Successful implementations on urban buses is all that I am aware of. The problem is the flywheel tends want to remain in the plane in which it is spinning. Demonstrated during a parade in the early 20th Century, the flywheel vehicle flipped on its side when the parade route required a right turn onto a new street...

However spinning in the plane parallel to the earth surface would offer a smooth ride, but the vehicle could become airborne over big dips in the road. It might add an extra thrill speeding down the streets of San Francisco for Steve McQueen fans.

Everyone wants to convert energy into electricity. But why bother? What do you do with electricity? As electricity, it is only good for electrocution. You got to convert it again to something useful. So you go solar to electricity, to something else. Each time you convert, you got an efficiency of conversion to contend with. And you multiply these. so 40% by 70% very quickly becomes a paltry amount especially if you have lots of steps. And if a simpler technology works, why not use it? People are infatuated with high tech and electricity. You already got electricity piped in. If you could use solar thermal for cooking your food and heating or cooling your house, it would save a lot of piping. The grid is going to have to be strengthened to take all this too and fro of electricity. Why not just use salt? The easiest most efficient solar is solar thermal. You can concentrate the solar light on the bottom of a pot of salt and have a flask round it. The only place for energy in or out is the bottom (no convection loss and small area for radiation. So it heats up all day. On the top is a covered insulated aluminium hot plate. The hotplate has legs reaching down into the pot of salt. Aluminium is a great conductor of heat and salt is a great storage material. Here are 2 links on how to make it happen. http://groups.google.com/group/ Sustainable-devellopment/web/tracking-solar-accumulating-barbecue and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPuQxaqu9gk I believe this can be done by a person of average skills if they have good instructions.

drive an Lord Kelvin Generator using an Atmospheric Vortex Engine (10,000 ft chimney)

water gets sucked up (a water spout) and through the ring(s) of the generator. The water could be captured at a higher elevation to drive a normal hydro-electric generator. **Warning** it could cause stormy weather in the vicinity.

http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=F5PvIPgJGx0

http://vortexengine.ca/index.shtml

Is that connected to the kelvinator some how?

come on... that's cryogenics. Nice try, bot.

The faraday generator is a spinning wheel and all of ots' energy is converted to an electric pulse in a fraction of a second.

Manufacturing smokeless solid fuel from clean dry (8% mc) sawdust, is what I am working on .With a central hole in the Briquette, we produce a "Venturi" effect and get a total burn, as the inside of our briquette, burns at a greater temperature than the outside.Today I started working with a microwave dryer, which processes wet biomass into dry biomass, very quickly. The World is changing...

The "chimney" in Spain has been operational for many years and was built as a "concept" device.

The "chimney" proposed in Aus is around 1,000m high (3,000 feet give or take) and is to have multiple turbines at the base of the tower enabling maintenance of individual turbines without shutdown.

The "energy source" is solar. There is to be a "greenhouse" of around 5km radius heating the air and soil beneath it providing a theoretical day and night operation from the stored thermal energy.

There were also hopes of growing tropical fruit/vegetables under teh outer portions of the greenhouse canopy where the air speed and temperatures were still reasonable.

Things have gone quiet on that project in the last 18 months. Maybe they got too greedy with a good idea and it's turning into a spruce goose design that's now stuck on paper.

Maybe if there was a scaled down version for interested individuals.

It's good idea but takes up a lot of space. How does it compare with a solar power tower? There is something called the fair weather field. There is voltage grasient at the tops of mountains that makes it possible to take electrcity out of the air and connect it to the grid. There volatges are very high. They tried it in switzerland in 1948 and a workman was killed by 30 foot lighning bolts coming off the machine and since then nobody has worked on the concept. There's al so possiblity it will change the weather in unpredictable ways.

Artbyjoe writes "why not just make every home self sufficient"

I could not agree more. And this should be our goal: The net zero energy home. Or better yet, abundant energy for both the home and transportation. Plug in your car, relax, and just wait for Mother Nature kick up your meters. This is the solution to the need for clean and abundant energy. Let goal one be Net Zero.

There are numerous impediments to this vision that can be overcome with political power but not necessarily subsidies. On the front line, where innovation begins, communities are hostile to renewable power for aesthetic reasons. Offshore wind farms have been quietly blocked by local politicians under pressure from influential special interests.

Local building codes discourage experimentation. Even subsidies require professional installation discouraging innovation and diversity in design.. Energy department grants go to cities, states, universities and public utilities, the small inventor is ignored. When markets are dependant on politician stability they are bound to fail as elections come and go. Witness the events of the seventies when subsidy was no longer supported by a fickle majority that one day wants to subsidize it and the next election it does not.

In my view, too much emphasis is being placed on utility size providers - otherwise known as the "grid". As a power provider mass utility is a faulty concept for many reasons but here are a few: The citizen is held hostage by a monopoly having little choice. if the grid goes down, in a short time many will be desperate. The Grid is vulnerable to massive blackouts and brownouts, sabotage, terrorism, and accident of catastrophic proportion, perhaps nuclear radiation proportion.

I see the grid as useful, as it can provide a central nerve system for redistribution of power produced by the individual home so that it is not dependant on batteries or more sophisticated storage of electricity. Storage however should be available should the grid go down.

Retrofitted to all homes should be a dynamo that will power energy efficient electrical devices that interact automatically with the human environment – turn on, turn off with motion, touch or voice. They become intuitive and predictive with the behavior of the occupants considering both comfort and conservation of energy.

There is only one realistic route to this paradigm – a market viable, energy producing device for the home that people will purchase because it is makes economic sense. That means it must be guaranteed (by the distributor) to save money, perhaps even make money for the homeowner.

The device must be inexpensive enough to be affordable when amortized by the amount of the reduction in utility bill. A simple equation is a six years of utility bills = x. That is the total amount that the device can be sold for. Within this number must be costs plus profit without subsidy. Regardless of the configuration, unless the device can stand on its own it will fail.

And I believe that it is becoming clear that net zero can be done most efficiently with concentrated solar power (CSP). It is said that 5 times the energy used by a home falls on the average roof. CSP trough technology is maturing. CSP trough construction is relatively light and not as aerodynamic as dish. CSP trough technology to create steam and matched with a turbine gets my vote as the most promising to Net Zero or better.

You are right on with your thinking!!!!

But for a domestic application, which is what you are talking about ? I agree on the local generation concept incidentally.

How about making big generators powered by big rubber bands manufactured from the sap from rubber trees.

Then we utilize minimum security prison inmates to culture and harvest the rubber from the trees.

Medium Security inmates to run the plant and keep the rubber bands wound..

Maximum Security inmates to test the power output with their tongues.

You can't get much greener than that and no one could complain about prison inmates being a drain on our tax dollars. They'd be supporting themselves.

Janissaries...Somebody has stolen your generator again haven't they?

No just coming with ideas to solve a few different issues at once.