Man-made tornadoes may produce green energy (PHOTOS)

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Published time: December 27, 2012 13:18
Edited time: December 27, 2012 17:51

A tornado forms in the sky above Aken some 150 kilometers.(Reuters / Holger Otto)

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Canada, Ecology, SciTech, Science

Massive man-made twisters reaching to the skies from cyclopean structures on the ground may be the future of suburban landscape. A Canadian firm is developing the technology to use the tornadoes to produce electricity – and assures it would be safe.

The company, AVEtec Energy Corporation, is working on a proof-of-concept device after winning this month a grant from The Thiel Foundation, a non-profit organization created by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. The machine is meant to make a rotating column of air that sucks air from its base like a natural twister.

The company already built a four-meter diameter prototype and will now use the grant money to construct a version twice as big, which it hopes will produce a 40-meter tall vortex with a diameter of 30 centimeters.

A concept engine. (Image from AVEtec website)

“Power output increases geometrically with size, so commercialization will become economically viable when we build a 40-meter diameter prototype in 2015,” said Louis Michaud, AVEtec president.

The proposed design is not unlike a conventional solar updraft tower, in which the sun heats up air in a large greenhouse-like structure and goes up through a tall chimney in the center. The air convection moves turbines to produce electricity.

The LM-6 prototype. (Photo by AVEtec)

The proposed Atmospheric Vortex Engine (AVE) takes a similar approach, but the air goes inside the tower through tangential inlets and forms a tornado. Thanks to the rotation of the air column it remains stable long after rising past the top of the chimney rather than mixing with the cooler ambient air. It can potentially go up as far as 20 kilometers for a vortex with the base diameter of 100 meters generated in a 200-eter diameter 80-meter high tower, the company’s website explains.

The height of this “virtual chimney” and the low temperature at its “outtake” in the troposphere means that the process can be sustained with a much smaller temperature difference that what is required for an updraft tower power plant to operate. In fact it does not require a solar collector farm, instead pre-heating the air on the intakes to start the process, the company says.

The device in action. (Photo by AVEtec)

The initial heat input may come from industrial waste heat (the company says one of the applications of the technology may be simply replacing cooling towers at plants with cheaper twister generators) or from a natural source like the tropical ocean waters – the same that give energy to the natural tornadoes and hurricanes.

The big ‘if’ in the technology is whether the man-made twister is able to survive a horizontal wind. This question can be answered only after a larger-scale test, the company says. If the concept proves reliable, it may become one of the cheapest sources of energy costing as low as 3 cents per kilowatt hour, which would also not produce additional emission.

Side effects of the technology, if it goes industrial scale, may include producing clouds and rains in a power plant vicinity and making the environment there somewhat cooler. AVEtec assures that an artificial tornado cannot run amok, destroying the plant that produced it and the neighborhood.

The device in action. (Photo by AVEtec)

Comments (21)

emmy (unregistered) 19.01.2013 12:59

The most important issue is not the activity nor the activators but the society from which it is developed or emerges from. Without the balance between the 'nanny' state of excessive interference and the collective responsibility of populations input and awareness to ensure that scientific activity and streams of development are done so for a positive purpose to society and human progress within the planet it habitats. Science has no motivation purpose in built on what serves human progress and Society. These come from outside.
How has such a development gotten off the page into reality reflects mostly what is going on within Canada. If it has no boundaries that activities emerge without scrutiny or questioning the purpose, need or consequences it is the Society that is most crises. Whether Canada is an actually nation as a mix of ancient and world populations or an world economic depot where people work but have no connection to place or indeed place in the wider world. This issue questions this. That science without intelligent stable supervision can be doom filled and destructive has long been proven reality.

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James Bowery (unregistered) 30.12.2012 20:24

What "environmentalists" have against a technology that could provide all the pollution-free baseload electricity civilization could use at a cost lower than coal is a fascinating study in irrationality.
If they have a problem with civilization, that is one thing -- so do I and I've been working for _decades_ to get technological civilization out of the biosphere while these "environmentalists" have been doing -- what exactly? What _exactly_ is their plan to take down technological civilization other than pretending to be parental toward it and say the equivalent of "your're so bad and evil and I'm so good for saying so!"?
As for those who are concerned about direct environmental impact of these devices (as opposed to the very indirect impact of making technological civilization more viable within the biosphere), they need to take into account the potential environmental benefits of appropriately restricted application of such a technology if it is actually deployed.
Moreove r, Thiel has funded a _research_ project. Its purpose is to discover potential problems before they are made manifest. This research project is _not_ dangerous. As it moves forward it will create models to discover under what conditions such a technology would be dangerous. In the worst case, it won't work at all. At the next-to-worst case these atmospheric vortex engines will have to be located in the equatorial oceans away from shipping and flight lanes.

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darwin (unregistered) 30.12.2012 03:13

We are on a self desctructive pattern. Humanity is most likely an evolutionary dead end. We have been around only for 200000 years. It is a blink of an eye in geological terms. With this economy based on the assumption of infinite growth takes us nowhere. If our oversized brain won't be able to figur out something very soon to solve this biggest crisis humanity has ever faced we will be in big troube. We will be the cause of the greatest extinction of all time including us by interfering nature without even bother to know the consequences.

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