Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/19/tornado_powered_generator_gets_peter_theiss_dollars/
PayPal founder funds 'tornado-driven' power plant
Green science or mad?
Posted in Science, 19th December 2012 01:06 GMT
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PayPal co-founder Peter Theiss’ Breakout Labs has spun some pin-money in the direction of a Canadian inventor who claims to have a “zero-carbon” electricity generator that works by creating a captive “atmospheric vortex”.
Or, in the more hyperbolic language of Breakout Labs, AVEtec, it’s a “tornado” driven generator.
AVEtec prototype vortex chamber
AVEtec’s [1] claim is that it can use waste heat from facilities like existing power plants – which is a fairly loose interpretation of the expression “zero carbon” – to heat air at the intake of its generation chamber. Warm or humid air entering the bottom of the chamber at the right angle, the company says, will produce a vortex within the chamber, with turbines designed to harvest that energy at the top.
Breakout Labs is putting $300,000 into a proof-of-concept designed to prove one way or the other whether the phenomenon can produce useful amounts of power at the low cost claimed for it (Breakout’s media release puts [2] the price at as little as 3 cents per kilowatt-hour).
At a diameter of 100 meters, the outfit says, it could harvest enough energy to produce 200 MW of power. The test receiving Breakout Labs funding is of a more modest scale: a little over 30 meters tall and nearly eight meters in diameter.
Using heated air to generate power isn’t new, of course. That’s also the principle behind solar thermal power – Australia’s CSIRO has such a plant in Newcastle and is working on an $AU87 million project to cut the generation price from 25 cents per kilowatt-hour down to 10 cents.
AVEtec president Louis Michaud explained the principles in an article in Mechanical Engineering, here [3]. ®