Mechanics and Construction > Mechanics and Construction

Wire connectiions and rotating platforms

<< < (5/5)

airman00:
Thats true, why hasn't any private company built it.

Also we are not exactly sure that it works. And maybe if it worked it would generate so little electricity that it would not be worth it. Imagine a huge 200 ft tower that generates 12 Volts @ 25 mA.

But hey, if it would work that would mean free electricity!
Cmon wont anyone build this?

crossroads1946:
Efficiency and cost are the key issues here.

First off, there is no such thing as free energy... That article made no mention about the source of the electricity to be transmitted wirelessly; simply the broadcasting and receiving of it. There still had to be a source before it could be transmitted. The cost of this source energy would actually be greater than if everyone simply tapped into the source through a wired system (for efficiency reasons, described next).

The efficiency of such a wireless transmission is extremely low. The total amount of electricity that can be drawn from the tower has to be less than (or in perfect conditions, equal to) the amount of power that goes into the tower from the source. Since the EM waves from the tower are broadcast in all directions, most of the energy will be lost. You can think of this in similar terms of a flashlight bulb. If you're trying to light up an object, you can aim  the flashlight at the object so that most of the light goes towards that object. It would be far less efficient to take the bulb out of it's reflector so that it light's up the whole room. Light goes everywhere, but as a result, it is much dimmer, and most of it does not even touch the object you're trying to see. The same goes for EM waves, in this case the wireless electricity. Omni-directional broadcast is much less efficient than directional broadcast, which is far, far, less efficient than a direct link from hard-wired.

The reason wireless power transmission was even considered back in Tesla's time was because there was no major infrastructure in place for wired power lines. They didn't already have wires and power lines run everywhere you can imagine, mostly because before Tesla himself invented Alternating Current, it was very difficult to send direct current on wires for long distances. Also, wire was still expensive and more difficult to manufacture than it was in later years. By using wireless power transmission, they could get around having to design and implement a massive infrastructure that would be very expensive to build.

After AC took root, the infrastructures were implemented, and wire and insulator technology was improved, wired electricity was far more efficient than the wireless alternative.

Baker

paulstreats:

--- Quote from: HDL_CinC_Dragon on September 05, 2007, 09:16:05 PM ---So whats to stop some privately funded individual from building a tower and using it to power up a building to show the world what it can do?

thought:
Governments spend MILLIONS of dollars on environmental stuff (except china... jerks) why not just build these towers all over the country and get rid of all other power plants except maybe the solar and wind ones so that way instead of losing millions a year to fight our own assets, we can just do way with the problem and have free energy for all!!... Does anyone want to go take over a small country with me, make it our own, and then show the world how much it sucks by being the most awesome and technically advanced society ever before imagined? :)

Im probably not seeing some politics here...

--- End quote ---

unfortunately what happens is exploitation.

most governments now are "EnErgy efficient" what they do is get their citizens to buy en3ergy efficient bulbs from countries like china.
Those bulbs manufacture take far more energy than a normal light bulb i.e. sourcing materials, making the plastics, transport etc.. what then happens is we use less energy in our country by using the product, but the country that made the product(china) has greater energy usage. its really just pinching from peter to pay paul :)
I read a report last year explaining this and also something similar with wind farms in that the energy they create in the life time of running is something similar to the energy it costs to manufacture them?

just some countries dont really care, and some countries would rather pass the buck than actually save energy and therefore money.

airman00:
I know it wasnt really "free energy". The tower was supposed to use the energy that the earth created by spinning.
Im not sure about the exact details but it had to do something with harnessing the power of the earth revolving.

The wireless transmission was terribly inefficient ( yet cool) but the tower used the earth as "the source"

HDL_CinC_Dragon:
Ah I forgot to say:
I wasnt referring to the wireless transmission of power. We dont need that. We can just wire everything... most countries already have the wire infrastructure needed. All I care about is the clean energy and such... im a BIIIIG proponent on clean energy...

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page