Right- Like regenerative braking on an electric car. Not free as in “out of nowhere”, just free as in “otherwise wasted”.
Of course, I doubt you’d ever be able to make it as efficient as say, an off the shelf solar panel.
2 Likes
No. We’re not talking about generating an infinite amount of energy – what we’re talking about is being able to generate as much energy we need at any given moment. Although humanity uses a lot of energy, in the Terawatt range, the amount of solar energy that comes in from sunlight is in Petawatts and so we’d have to be using a lot more energy than we do currently for our output heat to be more than the tiniest drop in the ocean.
Absolutely. It’s probably only a couple of percent, but that could still be useful (the linked article talks about how powering a car’s electronics from the tail-pipe heat could raise fuel economy a few MPG. Multiply that by 2 billion cars, and it could be worthwhile.
2 Likes
Doing that would effectively increase the efficiency of the air conditioner, but there would still be energy loss.
1 Like
Yes, the whole point is to increase the work that’s extracted from the energy source being used.
TANSTAAFL is still in effect in this particular universe!
They’re in the foothills of the Southern Alps, right? I think I’ve been tramping there.
1 Like
Not at this point. We currently just don’t have enough energy for our waste heat to be a significant contributor to global warming.
This would change if “free energy” were to be invented. But for one happy decade, we’d think that all our problems were solved.
Hmm, either they are intentionally committing fraud, or they are idiots. And it might be an interesting question, at least in some jurisdictions, whether they are guilty of some sort of negligence.
If they really believe what they are saying, then they are innocent of committing fraud in the same way that someone who sells a device that will burn down your house is innocent of arson, if they honestly believed the device wouldn’t do that, even though every competent engineer knew it would.
If it turns out to be true, it would also be sad. A perpetual motion machine would not only be a great invention, it would be the greatest disruption in the science of physics since… not since Albert Einstein. Maybe since Isaac Newton himself. If something like that were discovered by accident in an ideal world, the worlds top theoretical physicists would already be busy working out the theory behind it.
These people, on the other hand, are deluded enough to think that they are sitting on one of the greatest discoveries in the history of physics, and they keep it to themselves in order to raise venture capital and build an overpriced USB charger.
That is, of course, possible. I was assuming the parent post was referring to something that might be theoretically possible in the future. Extracting energy from a temperature differential, that’s the basic principle behind the steam engine, and we’ve constantly been refining the art ever since.
But still, thermodynamics places hard limits on how much energy you can extract from the waste heat of an air-conditioner.
Writing from the foothills of the Southern Alps, I’ll have to contradict you. The name sounds rather Northern German or Dutch to me, reminds me of the Wattenmeer. I have no clue how they managed to hide a mountain range in that scarily flat part of the world.
3 Likes
Who hijacked Boing Boing HQ and deactivated their complete bullshit detector?
Once they let Tim Ferriss in, they have to let everyone in.
2 Likes
This is a major goal of current work on developing new thermoelectric materials.
Yes! Just like the way diamonds sell for less than coffee beans these days, since it’s considerably cheaper to produce diamonds than good beans… 
1 Like
“what we’re talking about is being able to generate as much energy we need at any given moment”
And just how much do you think that will be? You are arguing that Steorn are recapturing energy that has been generated by the sun. That’s really easy to achieve, and to achieve far more efficiently. I am arguing that Steorn are saying that it is something else. If Steorn happened to be correct, and humans behave as they have been doing, then you would agree with me that we would have a big problem. Which was exactly Clarke’s point and the reason I stated it in the first place.
1 Like
++
And that’s not what they are claiming.
(BTW I go to the yearly ‘Steam Up’ here in Oregon. It’s great)
1 Like
It’ll be a lot less than it is now, actually. Consider how much of our waste heat comes from the wastage of energy in the process of getting it where it can be used, in a useful form. How much energy we spend on extracting oil and coal and natural gas, how much we waste while turning said fuel into electricity, much much heat is wasted as the electricity is converted from one format to another, before it gets to any of our devices or machines that can use it. If a free energy device existed and could be as small profile as this one, it would be easy to build one into every device that needs power, remove all power cords, and save an immense amount of energy in the elimination of the inefficiencies of energy transport.
Of course we’d eventually start generating enough energy to heat things up, but equating that and the current global warming crisis is disingenuous.
1 Like
And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.
Our imminent environmental catastrophe is because we are trapping more and more energy on this planet.
Steorn have this hypothetical “magical” energy source that you are now suggesting is a potential solution to our efficiency problems. Give me a break…
2 Likes
I think it’s great that the CEO is baller enough to stand there and say that the device they are selling is a scam, just like the last one.
4 Likes
The magnetic field explanation is a cover for the horrifying truth.
In another, adjacent dimension, the rocky, close-orbiting moon of an inhabited world is slowly, inexorably being drained of its orbital inertia.
Five years of Earth’s energy needs being met by Orbo methods will be enough to put the satellite within the world’s Roche limit and doom the place within a century.
14 Likes
I would read this sci-fi story. 
4 Likes
Kind of a ripoff of Asimov’s The Gods Themselves.
4 Likes
TO THE BOOKSTORE!
5 Likes
Or, if you’re not into reading, the Futurama episode “That Darn Katz.”
2 Likes
