Posted on 01/12/2010 7:13:23 AM PST by PeaceBeWithYou
With names like MotionPower™, SolarWindow™ and the like, it seems to me that they have spent more money on trademarking than on product development.
If you try to capture the energy in the subvelocity airflow around the car you will increasse the drag on the car, unless you get so far from the car (the median barrier) that most of the flow energy has already dissipated into thin air.
This is not the first guy to try to violate the first and second laws of thermodynamics and he won't, sadly, be the last.
You will find that for every attempt to find a free ride on mother nature there is a pitfal, trap or swindle. You could find it depressing or you could wake up and realize that at least there is a perfectly wonderful opportunity before us already, nuclear power, and so god did not abandon us after all.
I think you figured these guys out. To add a data point there is another outfit offers Phusor™s, which, as the name might suggest, “work” through cold fusion. I think they are also looking for “investors.”
So why not put the see-thru solar cell coating before the reflective coating and capture what you can, and still reflect the heat.
I'm in Louisiana so I could probably power both our houses in the summer with those shingles.
So are mine.
It's also dark at night.
There are too many cloudy days.
etc...
Solar works better in certain parts of the world. It will never be a single solution. There is a need for storage of the power.
Where it will help most is with air conditioning which usually coincides with peak sun.
The energy to run stuff in the building adds to its heat load no matter where the energy came from, so it’s a net wash.
Suppose such a plant was built in the Gulf Stream off Florida's East Coast. It won't take long into a cold spell before folks from New York to Greenland to France are complaining that it's stealing heat from them by sucking energy==heat from the Gulf Stream.
Like nuclear power plants in the USA, I do think the primary cost for such ocean hydro might be for lawyers.
That isn't the point. This guy is trying to sell stock to investors by offering variations on perpetual motion machines, which he has carefully trademarked, but seems not to have patented, or he would have claimed those too. (hint: the US Patent Office does not patent perpetual motion machines.) The principle is quite simple really. Every engineering student learns the first law of thermo-dynamics - there is no free lunch. The second law is that you cannot even get a fair break.
Anytime someone like this has a claim that sounds like he is not giving mother nature her due, he is most likely cheating the first or second law.
Call me a sucker, but I can’t find any claims of “perpetual motion”, or anything approaching such.
We get free energy the same way you get the free stuff on TV by paying the shipping and handling charges!!
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