Energy From the Atmosphere

There are a few articles about it, mostly in the financial papers.

Here is an interesting article.

Home site, SEFElectric.

Is today not the first of May? One month too late...

"Interesting" is not the right word for that dopey article, but "a hoot" will do.

I wonder how many investors will fall for it.

"I wonder how many investors will fall for it."

I see it's a penny stock. P.T. Barnum comes to mind.

Who is John Galt?

The wires will be made from transparent, nanotubular Cargonite^®. A recent, propreitary discovery of LynDoor™Industries, High as a Kite in a Blue Sky Division.

Not only is it a room temperature super conductor, but planes and birds can fly right through it and the wires will self-heal.

This is as silly as the new "Earth saving discovery", itself.

I think this ties in with some of what Tesla was working on. I'll have a look. I don't think we're talking lots of electricity.

Didn't Ben Franklin already do that?

Sorta. If it's true that much of Tesla's work is still classified, it would definitely fuel speculation.........................and bring the kooks out of the woodwork.

http://www.nuenergy.org/alt/tesla_energy.htm

All of Tesla's work that was classified is gone now.

Skull and Bones didn't want it in unwashed hands.

It was stored in the World Trade Center.

That's why the CIA blew it up.

LOL!!

That was pretty goofy, too.

Tesla was about half genius and half nutcase. The green/new/alternate energy crowd seems mostly to latch onto the nonsense part.

If you hang the wires where there is no airplanes the airplanes would not run into them. I believe air planes are not flying everywhere but have to remain in certain corridors.
I am not going to comment on the technology. Its been done already.

This one's news to me, and there doesn't seem to be much information on the company available.

SEFE reminds me a little of Steorn.

Oh boy, were we a bunch of scam artists with balls.

Back to SEFE, after a look at the website and the patent, things start to fall apart from a practical point of view (effectively this is method of apparently syphoning off static charge slowly instead of capturing and storing large static discharges - namely lightning).

The main problem (really) is you cannot harvest a lot of energy from what is effectively static electricity, especially with such a small area being proposed for the airborne receiver. Certanly not enough to make grid connection viable (which will become very apparent once they start having to give actual technical details for the proposed energy harvesting generators).

Even if they could, wouldn't an airplane run into the wires?

No, the altitudes being discussed are in the hundreds of feet range, and there are plenty of other designs being proposed for airborne kite and kind turbine designs where (unlike ground-based systems) location is not critical (so it isn't as big a problem as you might think).

Even if it worked and generated useful amounts of energy, some environmental group would find that it killed birds or bees or bats. Maybe it upsets the charge balance of Earth and that will lead to unspeakable disaster..........

do you believe that mining and burning coal kills birds and bees and bats? or mining, refining and reacting uranium? or damming a river to run a turbine? or manufacturing a solar panel and aluminum racking? or drilling, refining, transporting oil?

of course they do, and lots of people to boot. I know it's off topic, and these Tesla/scammers are annoying, but quit being such a GD simpleton. It reminds me of the person who protests animal cruelty in their leather jacket and boots. These environmental issues are real, and when we (including me) are opposed to making change to preserve the earth and our natural resources for the future, it's cause we are lazy and self righteous. Humans killing birds and bats is pretty pervasive, and it ain't cause people are looking for better ideas, it's what we do.

Was possibly their claim posted on April 1st? It seems to me "SEFE" comes from S(cience) F(iction).

"Not anything flying is UFO"

If there were that much energy in St Elmo's fire, it wouldn't just dance around spars and yardarms; instead it would typically burn ships to the waterline.

It is an old dream, many futuristics or utopic books had been wroten about.

Problem seems to be the material of captors that must be at hihg temperature or made of special materials.

Other problem is the dc-voltage, at normal condition and when lightening.

Carefully with investments!!!!

They claim to be able to capture electricity from the lower atmosphere with a balloon and wires to earth.

Or capture money from gullible people.

"Or capture money from gullible people"..........."Amen!"

WHY bother to 'advertise' tapping-into just a "portion" of the available free electricity? Why not go for it ALL...?

Perhaps they need to join forces with Obayashi, in THIS endeavor...

I've been wanting to try this, but a balloon would not work for me. Too many violent thunderstorms. I would use isolators to suspend about a thousand feet of thin wire, hook it to a spark plug, and then an auto's ignition coil. It would supposedly charge a 12 volt deep cycle battery........ in a few weeks. Enough free energy to power LED's for hours! Finally, I'm going off the grid!

As an added bonus, the more static I take out of the air, the less likely I'll get shocked every time I get out of my car and touch the door to close it.

Seeing they are pumping the shares (prior to dump?)

it sounds like a box of kippers to me? (smell fish?)

jt.

What do you call a jailbird on a camping trip?

criminal in tent... ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRcvYlgxtB0

How to build a clinking, clanking, clattering collection of caliginous junk.

Actually, it was pretty interesting. Wonder if it scales ?

"Caliginous"--that's a new one on me, and suitable for "HotForWords"!

I've never seen anything scaled up. They do produce some current though.I wonder what else Tesla would have come up with. Unfortunately, it gets pretty frustratiing, trying to locate decent info on this stuff. the crooks have the web pretty well covered up with cr*p.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_resonance

The problem with "They do produce some current though" is that "some" = not much. Thus is one of those order-of-magnitude problems where people often fail to do the arithmetic. But because there is "some" energy, this becomes a good vehicle for scammers.

Scammers' Credo:
"It is a noble profession to part fools from their money. After all, we will spend it more wisely than they did."

(whichever)

Yeah. There are scammers, and the ones that just want to believe.

There's a youtube video I watched a couple years ago, where a guy spent a lot of time and effort to make one of these things. He ran antennas way up in the tree tops, in his back yard. I think he also got enough juice to put a partial charge on a cell phone.

I'll admit that it's pretty cool that it works at all......................but it's not going to get anyone off the grid.

Your "Scammers' Credo" sounds like the Federal Government Credo to me.

Good observation. There's one big difference though...................the government takes away our choice of being "fools", and forces us into the role.

Wasn't something like this attempted by NASA via a tether that broke? And if I have it right, later ufologists said there were objects flying around in the footage.

Now going a little further off topic... If you are a Robert Deniro fan and never saw the movie "Stardust", you gotta check it out.

We have barely talked much about the actual source of electricity they can supposedly collect. I understand the textbook potential at the Earth's surface is 100V per metre, presumably increasing with each metre? Some of our respondents believe this is purely electrostatic, and the popular explanation for lightning is based on water vapour in clouds. However, since megalightning has been shown to occur at vastly higher distances in the atmosphere, I wonder if a re-think is needed to explain both types of lightning?

If Kristian Birkeland was right 100 years ago, the sun is the main source of electricity - as witnessed by his Aurora experiments. If current, sorry, "charged particles in a 'solar wind'" is flowing into our atmosphere, then maybe the atmosphere is a very big capacitor being charged every 12 hours, from a very big 'battery'? As europium says, we need access both ends of the circuit to make it drive any sort of load.

I don't think the sun is our source of electricity as Mr. Birkeland believed. I would say that the electricty we make use of every day is inherent in matter itself. It can travel best through materials like copper, and we make use of it by causing electrons to move from one place to another (like across a wire). I don't believe there is ever anything gained or lost actually. Just moved from place to place. That being said however, you do have to consider the fact that a high potential will try and seek an earth ground. Why? That's something to think about.

Now in the case of lightning, it seems that there is possibly already a static charge in the atmosphere that is able to make it's way to ground past what seems to be an insulating layer near the surface of the earth. During a storm (or an eruption for that matter), the clouds can reach great heights, and are filled with moisture which allows the conduction. Although the real explanation of lighting as I understand it, is supposed to be due to friction in the clouds. Who knows? maybe it's a combination of both. But the reason I mention this is because I can see there being a distinct energy field surrounding the planet. I might say that any failure to see a real flow of current in past experiments has been due to insufficient height of the collector. As far as completeing a circuit though, it may call for the other end being grounded directly to a large body of water rather than ground because of some insulating property of dry earth. I wanted to get into the idea of the sun providing some of this atmospheric charge, an bring up things like sprites and solar storms, but this is getting rather long to begin with.

All energy that we have here on earth, ultimately comes from the Sun, accentuated, but not caused by the Earth's inclination, whic may have been caused by Theia (or Orpheus)!!!!

Inclination is (almost) a fixed value except for a tiny bit of wobble occasionally....middle value of around 23.4°, but most say 23° for simplicity.

The process may not be immediately apparent, but if you look at any energy type carefully and maybe go back in time (fossil fuels are an easy example), you will find the Sun's input at some point.

Cloud movement, water vapour production are all due to Sun energy (and the Earth's inclination), therefore so is atmospheric electical energy/charge. It is simply not as obvious as fossil fuels are maybe.....

(For anyone interested further in Inclination, a good starting point can be found here:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_inclination

It basically causes the seasons, helps pick the rotational direction of Hurricanes and Tornadoes, long term climatic changes and and and and and......fascinating.)

I think that you might like this link also, more earth movements that influence climate:
Milankovitch cycles

All energy, barring nuclear.

And hydrothermal.

Of which the thermal part is due to heating of Earth's interior by means of radioactive decay.

Only partially. About 20% of the thermal energy in the earth came during formation and not from decay.

Yes. Not sure of the exact figure (or if there even *is* one, the number itself being a rough estimate), but it sounds reasonable.

"... helps pick the rotational direction of Hurricanes and Tornadoes."

Sounds like a bicameral committee effort with the Two Hemispheres deadlocked as usual in terms of preferred direction, with The Equator wisely abstaining (at least it knows where to draw the line).

I'm inclined to say the contribution from Earth's inclination (which is itself precessing with a period of roughly 26,000 years, but not only. It is also nutating at a variable rate) is marginal in light of Earth's diurnal period of 24-something hours.

I am not sure if you believe me or not, but its really true....I saw a program recently on the TV showing how the rotation of the planet and the angle of the inclination actually sets the direction of rotation of such weather (Tornados & Hurricanes). I was a bit surprised myself but they demonstated it in a very simple easy to understand manner....sadly I did not record it, apologies to all.

They also showed why Tornado alley has earned its name and reputation and how they are spawned, also very interesting.....

I think we got a little off topic there with the earth's rotation, orbit and inclination. But while we're there I made a statement similar to Andy's in another thread a while back. I feel or felt much as he does that all the sources of energy we employ on earth originated from the sun. I say felt because someone pointed out to me that you have to consider radio-active elements here (like europium has pointed out). I'm still on the fence on that one, because it just may be that these elements are absorbing some energy from the sun in some way. But for the most part I've conceeded.

And while we're off topic and discussing orbital issues. There was a thread a while back that i wanted to mention something in. It had to do with the corialis effect the we observe. It sure seems to me like this effect is not so much because earth's inertial forces as I think it's understood. But that it may be happening because of a drag being created from the sun's gravitational pull. I mean it better explains to me why the northern hemisphere experiences it's hurricanes towards winter. And the southern hemisphere experiences it's cyclones during thier's. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

Now to get a little more back on topic. I just wanted to point out that electicity would be defined as the surplus or deficit of electrons. And electrons are an integral part of matter. In other words, electricity doesn't require the sun to be here. Not that the sun probably doesn't effect electricity in our atmosphere. I'm sure it does somehow. When you consider things like the northern lights. Or the fact that our communications can be interrupted during solar storms, then you have to think it does. But I might make an analogy to a couple of pith balls that have been charged in one way or another and there interaction at a distance. You might look at the earth and the sun the same way I think.

The axial inclination causes the seasons, but affects cyclonal wind direction scarcely if at all. The Coriolis Effect is more responsible for that.

You might want to re-read my post. I just did and I noticed I misspelled "their's". It was to late to correct it

But to clarify what I meant... I'm not talking about the earth's inclination influencing these types storms directly. But only that the tilt brings about a more direct alignment with the sun's gravitational pull.

My point was directed more toward earlier posts than yours; however, the phrase "the tilt brings about a more direct alignment with the sun's gravitational pull" does not mean much.

But then this thread has much more pseudoscience than real science in it.

The tilt- meaning when the northern hemisphere is closer to to sun than the southern. I also can't argue with the pseudoscience. That it is

Here's a video from the Discovery Channel that reinforces my view though. It's a time lapse of the 2010 hurricane season.

During local high noon at summer solstice points on the Earth at 23.45 degrees north latitude will be perpendicular to the Sun's rays. They will also be closest to the Sun and closer by around 2000 km than they were at local high noon at winter solstice. A difference of only 2000 km out of 150,000,000 km approximately - the distance from the Earth to the Sun and assuming a perfectly circular orbit on Earth's part.

Now, given that sunlight (like any other light) obeys the inverse square law, the difference in total irradiance due to this difference in distance amounts to a change of around 0.00001%. Now, compare this difference in irradiance to the difference in temperatures between winter and summer on those days at that latitude. Evidently some other mechanism must be responsible, no?

Depend on the Discovery Channel for your information and you do so at your loss.

Just sayin'.

Erratum: 0.003%

Whomever marked my two posts (above) as being off-topic, you're absolutely right in doing so. I should have marked them OT myself. Apologies to all. -e ps: 'Erratum: 0.003%,' above, is a correction to the 0.00001% figure I gave in my earlier post. It should have read 0.003%.

No worries. :-)

Sounds like the same principle the Jules Verne used in 20000 Leagues under the sea, for his power supply. (Everything old is new again)