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Any one of these systems above would seem to make wonderful sense! None of them cause any pollution or even global warming in the tiniest! None of them require either fossil fuels or nuclear fuels, all of which have many environmental impacts as well as each being very rapidly being all used up. (Government and industry data shows that the US no longer has ANY operating Uranium mines (from the 39 that used to operate, and that we already import over 92% of the Uranium used in powerplants! US oil reserves would last us slightly over FOUR years if we had no imports, and US natural gas reserves would last us a little over eight years without imports!)
NO ONE TELLS THE PUBLIC ABOUT THIS STUFF!
So it was extremely surprising to discover that the US government and (large) US businesses have apparently ZERO interest in any such things EXCEPT if there are huge profits available for them! The reactions regarding each of these inventions (except the last, which is not yet operational) have been amazing!
Consider them individually:
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During 2003, he began paperwork on three different attempts to have my house Condemned so that he would then be able to demolish it, in June, August and September.
In any case, no demo of my electricity invention therefore ever happened! It is hard to have great incentive to proceed with such a project when someone who is a part-time Village employee, who apparently has amazing authority over you acts so strangely. (For the record, I had then contacted people in the Illinois Attorney General's Office, in the Cook County Board's Office, in the FBI, in the ACLU, and assorted other organizations, all of which informed me that they did not have any Jurisdiction over this strange man or the Village of Thornton. Apparently, only the Mayor of Thornton does, and they are apparently very good friends! It was a difficult position for me! As near as I can tell, there is NO ONE in the United States who seems to have any Jurisdiction whatever over this tiny Village, and they operate on a variation of something called 'Home Rule' and so I guess it makes sense that it operates a lot like a tiny kingdom!)
I guess I may be subjecting my house to possible Demolition in admitting that BEFORE April 2003, I had made a smaller tabletop-sized demo that worked excellently, which proved that the concept works!
There is a web-page that I have up about this concept (since Feb 2005) at Generating Electricity from Solar Energy http://mb-soft.com/public2/electsol.html.
For practical reasons, that web-page does not add much information to these comments!
I recently (March 2006) learned that the Soviet Union had been seriously investigating the same subject, even before it had occurred to me! But their attempts were (in my opinion) in relatively unproductive directions, which I believe is why they never developed it into anything useful. It appears that they built many devices that they thought would be productive, but none of them were. All of their devices that they described to me involved massive gear-trains to speed up some things to a level that has certain advantages in such things, but all their gears had mechanical losses that were certainly always far greater than anything productive they were able to produce. Their scientific research organizations still exist, and they contacted me and recently had extremely strong interest in combining efforts with me. However, their government reminded them of an official government policy where they ONLY get involved in "universities or research institutes". When I was not willing to lie to them to claim that I am any part of such an organization, they apparently could not proceed further with me! Isn't that interesting? And impressively bureaucratic?
There is a web-page that I have up about this concept (since Nov 2002) at Perfect Energy Source http://mb-soft.com/public2/earthrot.html.
So my invention, of capturing massive amounts of power from even low-head hydro situations, seemed to be an ideal idea! (If I was not in danger of getting my house demolished by the individual mentioned above, I had intended to do a small demonstration of a ONE-FOOT HEAD facility on a small creek which calculated to produce around 25,000 watts of continuous power. Obviously, I could never try it!) Depending on the flow rate of various rivers, commonly between 5 and 8 megawatts of electricity should be available (locally) from each. Given that there are around 7,700 such dams which already exist, it seems to me that the potential for generating between 35,000 and 60,000 megawatts of electricity! Again, using NO fuel, either fossil or nuclear! And creating NO global warming or environmental impacts! (This is around 10% of all the electricity that the US consumes.)
This is not even describing the construction of any additional dams, although it seems likely that several thousand would be possible in the US. Just modifying a portion of the existing dams. For an additional 10% of all the electricity we use in the US. Seemed like a deal to me!
As background, there are currently around 100 operating nuclear powerplants in the US, and they collectively can produce around 100,000 megawatts of electric power. So what is suggested above is roughly HALF THE COMBINED OUTPUT of all operating nuclear powerplants in the US! And they would use ZERO fossil fuel, ZERO nuclear, send ZERO carbon dioxide or heat into the atmosphere, i.e., be about as GREEN as anything can get!
As more background, those nuclear plants provide around 1/5 of all the electricity used in the US, the point being, a whole bunch of these moderate-sized hydro plants could really make a difference! In contrast, by the way, ALL the existing (2007) wind-generation facilities in the US provide only about 1/10 as much power as a SINGLE nuclear powerplant does. And we are talking about low-head hydro that is equivalent to 50 full nuclear powerplants. So "alternative power" such as wind might seem like a really popular idea, which everyone seems to love, but the actual functionality is very disappointing! Low-head hydro could easily provide 500 times as much power as all those windmills now do.
A (bigger-than-tabletop) demo of this system worked to brightly light (nearly at full brightness) three car headlights, for around 3 minutes, on only the amount of water in a standard 55-gallon drum. (460 pounds of water at 21 feet high had 9600 ft-lb of potential energy, which is about 220 watt-minutes of energy. The car alternator used kept the overall efficiency down to around 70%, so around 155 watt-minutes of electricity was actually created. That experiment was providing the headlights a total of around 60 watts for just under three minutes. Not full brightness but still decently bright.) So the concept is proven and the extremely high overall efficiency of it was also proven. A bigger demo was contemplated, because a 40-foot-wide, gentle (2 mph) stream is adjacent to my house. A ONE-FOOT-TALL dam would not have affected the non-navigable creek, but around 25,000 continuous watts of electricity would have been available to supply nearly all the electricity that two dozen local houses would need (which would forever have eliminated all their electric bills!) All I wanted to show was that even a one-foot head was plenty for substantial electricity generation. But, of course, I have a strange bureaucrat who would love to have an excuse to Condemn and demolish my house! So I will not do that.
But this is where this subject becomes even stranger! It turns out that the US Army Corps of Engineers has an enormous amount of authority over the waterways in the US. THEY would have to endorse the concept, if any actual usage was ever to be made on any actual river. I regularly enjoy visiting and exploring the Starved Rock State Park in Illinois, and there happens to be a flood control dam adjacent to that Park. I had long thought it would have been an excellent location for using my concept, where around 8 megawatts of constant electricity would then forever be available to the local towns around there. But I found that the US Corps of Engineers people think like good government/military bureaucrats! They have NO interest whatever in me or my concept, and they instructed me to first sign up with the government in Washington as a potential Vendor to the government. (I am told that the process generally takes a year). After that, I would have to submit complete plans, in quintuplicate, for potential approval of Washington bureaucrats (which I am told takes another year). At THAT point, I MIGHT be allowed to actually talk to someone in the Corps of Engineers. Then THEIR bureaucracy kicks in. If I was really lucky, within only four or five years of filing paperwork, there might be some serious consideration of the concept! And then, at that point, the government would issue a Request for Bids, in newspapers (for a few months) and then the government would select the Lowest Bidder, for actual progress.
Now, anyone who actually knows me KNOWS that I am not about to be filling out five years of paperwork to try to do a Good Deed! Yes, I would REALLY like to make this concept available, but there are limits to how much boot-licking I would do even for such a worthwhile invention!
Unfortunately, that would not be the end of my "issues" with such a circus. Somewhere along that line, the giant multi-National mega-corporations would learn about it. Clearly, a potential new market for powerplants would get their attention. The current cost for a new conventional electric powerplant is over $2 million/megawatt of production capacity. With devices that should be able to supply around 8 megawatts, I suspect their Accountants could figure out they might be able to sell them at around $16 million each. And if even just 7,000 were ordered, (and they would, because they are so GREEN by not requiring ANY fuel to produce the electricity) that Accountant should be able to see $112 billion in potential sales! And being "green" in not even causing any pollution or global warming, they would probably think that a premium price could be gotten! And since it would never even need any fuel (lots of more $$$ savings, and probably fewer staff to operate the powerplant), more still. After all, in America, companies are taught to charge as much as the market will bear!
However, around January 2005, I had already completely designed all the necessary parts, including part drawings, materials lists, construction personnel required, construction procedures involved, even the excavation costs related, and done all the work in Engineering and then writing the construction and assembly instructions. (It is quite huge and must be constructed on-site) I already knew then that, at current material prices, the total materials for an installation (NOT including the electrical components) is ball-park 1/4 million US dollars, and total labor another ball-park 1/4 million. So even at a potential selling price of $1 million for the whole critter, there would be wonderful profits.
Do you see the obvious problem? Accountants of giant corporations see that they could sell them for at least $16 million each, and little me would insist on them being sold for $1 million each. Question: Who would win that disagreement? And if I was able to cause even a minor inconvenience to them, in pursuing the profits they saw available, the movers-and-shakers would just have lunch with some Senator friends, and soon after a new Law would be passed that required such a device to comply with ISO-9002 or some extensive test procedure that only the giant corporations could afford. Such a sequence has occurred many times before, and it is a main reason that it is so popular that businesses love to give money to politicians for re-elections and that they have PACs and all the rest. It would be quite easy for any mega-corporation to eliminate me from even marketing my own invention! (I personally know of several dozen times that sort of thing has happened, but it clearly has happened many thousands of times to small companies, once large companies wanted to take over a market.) In any case, that would then enabled that mega-corporation to then do pretty much as they pleased with my invention.
They certainly would offer me some payment, probably even quite a bit for this thing. They do not seem to understand that I feel that ethics and principles are far more important than money is! Their money really wouldn't interest me, because of all the trickery and deception which is considered SOP (standard-operating-procedure) in modern big business. I happen to be personally disgusted by such behaviors, and I will NOT provide new motivations for them to continue to behave in such ways. I wish I could think that was just a cynical view, maybe of some "angry person", but I am not angry at all, but this is certainly the truth, regarding how they consistently behave when they see large profits that they see as available to them. Sad.
It is CERTAINLY a contributing factor that I happen to be a Pastor of a Christian Church (since 1996). I like to think that I have certain attitudes and principles that might be fairly similar to those Jesus might have had! And even though I know I could never approach His ways of dealing with such things, these (odd) ideas are my efforts to try to emulate Him, as per WWJD (What Would Jesus Do).
Rather than follow the norm to try to amass the greatest amount of money (which many people insist I do, because they I could give it away for good causes!), I think it is more important to humanity and society to try to show that there is a different path toward happiness and fulfillment, that does not include being called a billionaire! I have long noted from the Bible that Jesus' "net worth" was likely never above $100 worth! He walked everywhere, apparently not owning a camel or mule or donkey. He did not seem to own a house anywhere, and it is unclear if he even owned carpentry tools (because He would then have had to carry them on all those very long walking journeys). So, when Christians or anyone else insists to me that I have some kind of "Christian responsibility" to become disgustingly wealthy, I generally just smile. We know that Jesus "changed the world" and much of that was because of the Wonderful, non-materialistic Person that He was. I obviously cannot do what He did, but I can try to represent an example of trying to maintain ethics and principles which He might approve.
I have intentionally NOT made a web-page on this concept. Until and unless I could be totally assured that some amount of ethics and principles would exist, I see no reason to give mega-corporations a way to get another quick $112 billion in business, and then much more internationally. Some things are just very, very wrong, and I see NO way that this could be pursued without the basest parts of human nature (primarily greed and avarice) being encouraged. I do not intend to provide such encouragement!
Well, because of the US Corps of Engineers announcing to me that IF there were any such worthwhile concept, that THEIR people were brilliant and would have thought of it (apparently implying that I am stupid, I guess!) and the expected behavior of the giant corporations that would certainly try to take over such a lucrative market, I wondered whether my set of plans would ever be used on any river anywhere! Some people in Nigeria contacted me, because they wanted to install one there, and I had brief interest, until they informed me that we would have to pay fairly large bribes to a string of names of officials, to get necessary permissions! That was enough for me! Later, officials in the Ukraine showed extremely strong interest. They had just had their energy supplies shut off by Russia for several days, and they were interested in energy self-sufficiency. They happen to have many small rivers coming down out of the mountains, so they could easily install many flood control dams (some of which already exist) to use this. Unfortunately, for completely separate reasons (mentioned above) they were informed that they were not allowed to continue working with me! More recently, still, the government of India has apparently had moderate interest. We shall see if anything comes of that!
Late in 2005, I realized a way of how to do both at once, and with relatively inexpensive devices, which were also nearly indestructible. Rather than trying to compete against Nature straight up, in the usual ways of creating breakwaters and other massive concrete structures, these are not even permanently fixed in place! In some ways, they more resemble the navigation buoys that bob around out in the water!
Each device does not generate very much electricity, around 12 kiloWatts is realistic. But they are each small and cheap enough to build that a hundred such devices would produce a little over 1 megaWatt, using around two-blocks-worth of ocean shoreline. A normal ocean town might have 20 blocks of ocean frontage, so around 12 megaWatts might be available, and rather reliably. I don't know if towns would consider that much effort and trouble to be worth it for just 12 megaWatts of reliable and free electricity, but the fact that it would also eliminate the need for very expensive breakwaters might help their thinking. In any case, even though 12 megaWatts is not a spectacular amount, that should still be enough such that all the residents and most of the businesses in that town would forever have free electricity.
Regarding breakwaters, the design of these devices is such that they REMOVE POWER from the waves which are headed toward the shore (converting that power into usable electricity) which therefore makes the waves have smaller height. Several rows of these devices can remove as much of the waves' power as might be desired. Even though the waves do not crash into a concrete breakwater, they lose most of their destructive power in a more gentle (and also productive) procedure!
I am not sure whether there would ever really be a market for this concept. In any case, dozens of people I have mentioned this to have each insisted that I allow THEM to manufacture and sell them (otherwise I would never be able to, they each say). It sure looks like greed again, where people see the chance to make a pile of money without actually having to do much to earn it!
The appearance of that greed in people regarding this system has caused me to be reticent about providing full information regarding how to build them and exactly why they work. On a small scale, I have proven to my own satisfaction that they can do what the math and Physics equations say they can do!
Maybe I share too much of Diogenes' viewpoint! There is a famous NBA basketball player who grew up in a very poor area of Africa. He initially hoped to become a doctor there, where he would have earned something like $30/month or $100/month. So he grew to be 7 feet tall, and eventually got paid around $14 million each year. He decided to try to get a medical clinic build in his original home town. The expected cost was to be $10 million (I think).
All that is wonderful, so far. But then he chose to only invest $4 million of his own money, and the potential of a Clinic dragged on because little other donations were received. Can you imagine MY problem with that? Did he forget who he was? Did he forget where he came from? Wouldn't a truly caring, loving person from his life simply have provided 100% of what was needed? He would still have all the millions from previous years, but yes, he might have labored on the basketball court for an entire year without personally receiving any money. Why would that be wrong? In my opinion, if he had immediately decided to do that, the Clinic would have quickly been built, and many people from his hometown would probably have lived instead of dying.
I guess I just have a lot of trouble in seeing why people seem to always get so corrupted in morals and principles upon getting lots of money. Given the inventions described above, three of which have already been proven to work as designed, I suppose that I am a likely candidate for being ABLE to accumulate unimaginable piles of cash and then to spend a life worrying about getting still more! NOT!
I have already been giving away the "free air conditioning" for about 6 years, and the 7,700+ people that we know of who have apparently installed it would certainly have given me $500 a pop. So I certainly could have gotten an easy $3 million just from that! In my own strange way, I have twisted that, too! People interested in that can give $250 (anonymously) to any Church, Charity, Temple, Mosque, etc, and I then send them a "Technical Packet" with advanced Engineering information for unique applications. So far, over 4,700 people have requested those Technical Packets. I never require that they prove that they made the Donation, but the way I look at it, 4,700 times $250 is more than a million dollars that has (anonymously, a requirement) been given to assorted organizations that might benefit from it. I personally like to think that a Soup Kitchen might find it wonderful to receive an anonymous $250 in the mail or under their door! And I also give away a system so kids might avoid Childhood Obesity, where I probably could have made even more. I am currently trying to find ways to provide safe drinking water to billions of people who need it, again, for free.
So I am not likely to be receptive to the many people who enthusiastically inform me that, "with their help," one or more of the above could "make me a ton of money". I smile every time I hear that, and realize again that virtually everyone seems to now exclusively think that success and happiness are entirely dependent on having lots of money. That realization always makes me very sad. I do not know Donald Trump or Bill Gates, but I have to doubt that they are any "happier a person" than I am! Maybe they are!
People who are NOT in positions of power tend to read web-pages such as this one, and many of them e-mail me to say they agree. But they then invariably tell me that I have RESPONSIBILITIES to release such inventions to the world. Maybe they are right, and they always add many explanations and their ideas on how these various problems might be avoided. But unfortunately, most of them have never operated a decent-sized company (the largest I started and ran had a maximum of about 85 employees at one time, around 800 employees total), and so they don't have some insights regarding just "how things work". People who have never experienced that tend to have an optimistic opinion on how simple it would be to resolve such things! Not the case! People who operate such businesses KNOW what a nightmare it is, pretty much every day! So I guess I can understand why they would have a somewhat greedy attitude toward some opportunity to finally "cash in". Still, I don't agree!
I happen to be a Christian who truly feels that we each have strong responsibilities regarding how we behave and think, particularly regarding the amazing importance money has achieved in modern life. I have tried to think up ways where a potential effort might represent some sort of "example" for people on how it might be possible to achieve success and be happy WITHOUT always feeling the need to squeeze every extra nickel out of everyone.
Yes, I already see the funny part, where I had referred to townspeople forever getting free electricity! It would obviously never actually happen, because bureaucrats would figure out excuses to charge fees or something anyway! Many parts of modern society cannot be overcome!
Now, if I had invented the wheel, yes, I would agree that has had lasting benefits. But I do not see where any of the concepts presented above have value, at least not yet. Now, once all the petroleum is gone, and all the natural gas and uranium, and assuming that some part of humanity survived the behaviors which figure to occur, sure, THEN, these concepts would be VERY useful! And people might then actually simply use them rather than seeing them as ways to get filthy rich.
I am quite aware that these are bizarre attitudes. I consider these concepts to be relatively simple (except for the earth rotation one) and actually inventable by shrewd high school science students! So it is not really like the entire future of civilization hangs on these inventions! HOWEVER, I DO believe that the entire future of humanity will depend on our re-learning things like the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments and the like. I consider my "job" as a Christian Pastor as over-riding my talents as an inventor! And possibly attempting to try to teach a lessened focus on pure materialism. It is as simple as that!
So I suppose this is a pointless web-page, isn't it? You just had to tolerate philosophical grumbling and "editorial comment", for no obvious purpose. Sorry about that!
When the House of Representatives gerrymandered the District lines so that they could make sure they always got re-elected, into truly bizarre District shapes (look at a map of them some time!), it confirmed to me that they really ONLY care about ensuring their own jobs, and only make decisions based on people who talk to them, meaning people who are willing to give millions of dollars to their re-election campaigns. My point is that they really are never likely to encourage people to become truly energy independent, because it would financially hurt the giant companies they depend on for donations. So we are each pretty much on our own! The devices that I think are realistically built by handy people, like the windmills and the improvements to them (and the associated auto electric parts); and the free air conditioning; and the DIY Version 4 solar heating system, and the free Childhood Obesity Bodyfat monitoring system, and such things; I have tried to present complete plans or guidelines.
If and when some Grass-Roots movements ever seriously develop, I am there, and THAT might be a situation where I would release one or more of the critters discussed above. Given my "day job", I note that Jesus accomplished that, a single quiet Person who has definitely changed the world! Gandhi was a recent example of someone who did something pretty impressive, too, entirely changing the government and mind-sets of half a billion people in India. So I DO see it as actually possible to "change things". I even happen to have been provided with some "tools" with which such things might be accomplished. But given our current attitudes of society and government and all businesses, where money is the ONLY thing that matters, I cannot say that I have the slightest interest in participating in that dance!
I guess I am not smart enough to figure out really simple ways to design such devices, such that they could be built by individuals. If I ever think of a way for any of them, I probably will immediately upload another web-page presenting another free invention!
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C Johnson, Theoretical Physicist, Physics Degree from Univ of Chicago