The way I look at energy harvesting is the source has to be able to meet or exceed the demand of which RF harvesting tends to be only good for micro to milli watts whereas most average practical applications of electrical power need watts to kilowatts of supply capacity and that simply comes down to what sources can meet the demands in a practical cost effective way plain and simple.

 

There has got to be a more efficient way to collect what is coming from that fusion reactor so many miles away!

First of all, WHY has there got to be something better? It's like saying "there has got to be a way to time travel". No, there doesn't have to be. Wishing for it and being frustrated by nature doesn't make it anymore likely. But that's just a rant.

We do have a LOT of ways to collect energy from the sun. The oldest is simple passive heat collection on the Earth. It's a big part of the greenhouse gas warming discussion. More recently plants came along. Plants are pretty darn good at turning sunlight into food and fuel, which seems cooler than even making electricity. In the process they remove CO2 from the air to boot. They even hold onto soil, filter water borne pollutants and so much more. Sunlight drives the winds and man has been harvesting that for centuries. In modern times we have active solar collection and PV panels.

In all of these methods for using solar energy, we're fairly far up the learning curves. I mean, there is a limit to the amount of solar energy striking the Earth at any one moment, and while we continue closing the gap we cannot raise the limit.

 

What is all this nonsense about free energy and novel ways of harvesting it?

What??? You mean you haven't talked to Mulder & Scully??? The truth is out there man! It's the cigarette-smoking man preventing us from reaching our full potential!

 

... there is a limit to the amount of solar energy striking the Earth at any one moment, and while we continue closing the gap we cannot raise the limit.

I don't think that solar is the way to go, there is simply not enough wattage per square meter to provide enough energy for everyone, without disrupting other things, such as vegetation or the surface of the sea. I think that the future still lies in fusion nuclear power (which is always 30 years away)
But, if not fusion, and the politicians stick to solar, I think that the only way to go would be to build solar panels in outer space, and find a way of beaming that energy (maybe microwaves?) down to earth...

 

If you build a crystal radio and tune it to the frequency of a near by radio station or other high powered local RF source you can light up LED's with it.

An archive of Wireless World magazine I found, there was a snippet of news from many years ago in Germany - a number of people living in the shadow of a radio transmitter had rigged up induction coils to harvest some of the RF energy for house lighting.

Apparently the radio station was trying to have them prosecuted for stealing energy.

The latest thing it seems is; harvesting acoustic energy, an article in one of the hobby magazines describes a new nano-rod coating that might someday make mobile devices self charging.

 

Coincidence that many scientific inventors in the past has been found killed or dissapearef because of their inventions to get rid of fossil fuels?

Uncanny for me. Will the governments or oil companies take out those scientific discoveries made by these dissapeared people, when green house effect and contamination generated by fossil fuel will be irreversible ?

Conspiracy or not? Really I don't know what to think about these dissapearances.

 

Here is something that has always worked well for me.



When we have storms Kathy and I head out to the fields and catch lightening, placing it in mason jars for storage. Then when we need power I just open a few jars, process my stored lightening. I keep my jars out in the shed.

On a more serious note when I was a kid during the late 1950s I was playing around with the simplest form of crystal radios and using 1N34 Germanium Diodes. We had a local AM radio station (WHLI Long Island NY) about maybe two miles away. Using a 40 meter diapole antenna and a good ground I could listen to WHLI using my headphones, look Ma, no power. I also noticed that if I brushed my antenna against a copper water pipe (Ground) I saw small tiny sparks. That was my first discovery of a lifetime at about age 8. My second discovery of a lifetime was when I figured out and accepted the fact that while I did have electricity I didn't have enough of it to do anything. Pretty much what my father had explained to me but I had to learn for myself. Spreading coils out under high voltage power lines didn't work either.

Ron

 

What is all this nonsense about free energy and novel ways of harvesting it?

True, nothing is free although people can take advantage of what is offered freely or otherwise from energy expended by other people or from the elements. The so called Affordable Health Care Act proves this to be true in many forms but such things go back to potential energy and kinetic energy don't they? Ask any battery! All of the electrons (free or enslaved) are just sort of doing their own thing but of course people like us come along and force them to do something for us because we bought the batteries or used elements in order to make our own against the will of the electrons by exploiting them! Yes, I'm guilty too! The more I learn the more it feels like real life right where I'm at, outside of the battery. All the free people (electrons) seem to be the ones who are forced to do the bulk of the work against their will. Look at yourself for example. A bill comes in the mailbox and you, being the free electron, feel pressed to rise at some point very soon and either drive to an office and pay the bill or expend energy in order to type online and pay or perhaps expend energy in order to go purchase a money order and a stamp and write a bunch of stuff on an envelope and then lick it when you haven't even dated yet and after that place it into a box you haven't been properly introduced to yet! The other electrons serve some purpose but they sort of get to hang around closer to their comfort zones don't they? Little is expected of them. I'm still learning but it seems to me that certain electrons, same as certain people, expend little energy and expect all of the free ones to hop around constantly and thus keep them in their comfortable environment. Nothing is really fair in love or war or electronics is it?

 

Coincidence that many scientific inventors in the past has been found killed or dissapearef because of their inventions to get rid of fossil fuels?

Uncanny for me. Will the governments or oil companies take out those scientific discoveries made by these dissapeared people, when green house effect and contamination generated by fossil fuel will be irreversible ?

Conspiracy or not? Really I don't know what to think about these dissapearances.

Often it is not a disappearance of the individual but rather a large amount of money paid for the Patent rights which then either go into a safe or a paper shredder.

 

First of all, WHY has there got to be something better? It's like saying "there has got to be a way to time travel". No, there doesn't have to be. Wishing for it and being frustrated by nature doesn't make it anymore likely. But that's just a rant.

We do have a LOT of ways to collect energy from the sun. The oldest is simple passive heat collection on the Earth. It's a big part of the greenhouse gas warming discussion. More recently plants came along. Plants are pretty darn good at turning sunlight into food and fuel, which seems cooler than even making electricity. In the process they remove CO2 from the air to boot. They even hold onto soil, filter water borne pollutants and so much more. Sunlight drives the winds and man has been harvesting that for centuries. In modern times we have active solar collection and PV panels.

In all of these methods for using solar energy, we're fairly far up the learning curves. I mean, there is a limit to the amount of solar energy striking the Earth at any one moment, and while we continue closing the gap we cannot raise the limit.

I read you but there has to be something better because we were born striving and the universe goes on as it does with immense powers we do not fully understand yet as a race, despite the fact that we have made great strides as you pointed out in so many words. Being as ignorant as I am about so many things I often tell myself that there has got to be a better and more advanced 'me' and that is part of the reason I am here asking questions and conducting my perhaps silly experiments. I feel driven to dream and explore and wonder and improve. I believe we were all born with that desire for whatever reason.

It seems reasonable to me, in the midst of my limited knowledge aforementioned, that we certainly 'cannot raise the limit' but the important thing is to know FULLY what that limit is. I'm not sure the smartest person on earth really knows what the universal limits are. Thus, all of the theories proposed and taken very seriously such as the String Theory only to name one.

At the same time, it would be nice to vanish away from all of this into some little corner of a small and yet undiscovered pond like Waldon and live deliberately without need for taxation, representation and such. Sort of like the birds and the beasts I see living freely all around me. I must say that myself, feeling quite enslaved despite my best efforts working as hard as I do only to see it go to others mostly by force, tends to cause me to wish at times that I could live as freely as those birds and beasts I see each day a few feet from the sunlight which reflects off of them and into the light receptors we tend to call eyes.

Perhaps I've made little sense but these words are coming mostly from a place apart from the brain we sometimes refer to as a heart. However, my brain did interpret this into English so the main feeling my heart was attempting to get across could have been lost in translation.

 

Coincidence that many scientific inventors in the past has been found killed or dissapearef because of their inventions to get rid of fossil fuels?

Uncanny for me. Will the governments or oil companies take out those scientific discoveries made by these dissapeared people, when green house effect and contamination generated by fossil fuel will be irreversible ?

Conspiracy or not? Really I don't know what to think about these dissapearances.

So, could you provide a list of all of these scientific inventors that have been found killed or disappear because of their inventions to get rid of fossil fuels -- and show that the rate at which the get killed or disappear is statistically greater than scientific inventors that did not invent things to get rid of fossil fuels?

 

So, could you provide a list of all of these scientific inventors that have been found killed or disappear because of their inventions to get rid of fossil fuels -- and show that the rate at which the get killed or disappear is statistically greater than scientific inventors that did not invent things to get rid of fossil fuels?

I have the video of these dead inventors.

 

I have the video of these dead inventors.

These aren't dead inventors man, these are new crew members that always die in every episode! How do you think the main crew stayed alive so long?

Captain Kirk: "We've got a serious and dangerous issue spock? What should we do?"

Spock responds, "Simple logic... send the new guy to investigate!".

 

These aren't dead inventors man, these are new crew members that always die in every episode! How do you think the main crew stayed alive so long?

Captain Kirk: "We've got a serious and dangerous issue spock? What should we do?"

Spock responds, "Simple logic... send the new guy to investigate!".

Kirk: "Yes, and let's issue them one of the new red shirts."

 

Here is something that has always worked well for me.

View attachment 81328

Ron

so its solved now?

The solution is good old glass jars, and a wheelbarrow. Looks reasonable to me.

 

On the subject of energy harvesting, someone might figure out a way to capture energy from lightning strikes or charged clouds.

There's a mountain range in Catatumbo, Venezuela that has at about 250 days of thunderstorms per year and there are various proposals for collecting energy from lightning. However, none of them have practical application.

 

This has been a quite enjoyable, informative and at times humorous thread and it continues to be all three. Interestingly enough to me anyway, in the course of the conversation I began to think about what we call emptiness. Maybe because of the humorous post related to capturing lightning in a jar (apart from a leyden jar on a small scale which we can indeed do easily in a sense). But sometimes I get very excited when I manage to capture the energy around me in a pretty decent way via a capacitor or a battery or merely get a reading on the voltmeter proving it is there! That stuff we call energy is indeed there! I get all excited about that but why? What happens when I get excited about it? Why do I feel so good about it? Where does that excitement go that uplifts me? Perhaps into some empty place within myself that is now somewhat full and has been longing to be filled for a very long time? So what is emptiness? The jars waiting for something to fill them up but still content to be jars whether they get filled or not? Is a capacitor or a battery more content sitting idle with no charge or sitting with a strong charge or does it matter? I got to thinking about what we call empty and suddenly realized that what we call empty is actually the long sought after perpetual energy machine in potential form that could care less whether it becomes kinetic or not. What we consider nothing is always there and never goes away. It exists forever in and of itself and we need it to make batteries or hold tools or to store our belongings our ourselves for that matter. We need it to move freely about and even the air around us needs emptiness to float about. Picture yourself in a metal box with no way to get out. At least you can move about freely albeit in a constricted way within the confines of that metal box thanks to what we call emptiness. So we keep looking at what we can do with that we consider to be useful and tend to disregard emptiness as a vital thing, despite the fact that we use what we call emptiness each and every day. There is power or potential in what we call empty that we would not be able to live without. Perhaps we need to rethink things when we experiment? I know, I think outside of the box I suppose but I did a little search and found this old thing from some ancient writing that is worthy of contemplation in my estimation:

"Thirty spokes together make a
wheel for a cart.
It is the empty space in the center of the
wheel which enables it to be used.
Mold clay into a vessel.
It is the emptiness within that creates
the usefulness of the vessel.
Cut out doors and windows in a house.
It it the empty space inside which creates
the usefulness of the house.
Thus, what we have may be something
substantial,
But its usefulness lies in its emptiness.

From the Tao Teh Ching

 

a stepup transformer would have to be very broadband or tuned to the strongest em field near you. an audio pr power transformer would not work. also, the more you try to pull from the fields, the less you would get, like tapping the coil on a crystal radio to match the impedance of the crystal diode and its load. try to get too much and you spoil the Q of the coil, reducing the output.
to measure the field around you, look up "field strength meter".

 

the way to tell a psuedo scientific scam, "the government is supressing it. " it makes energy", its a new science"
em energy harvesting at useable levels, unless your next to a very high power transmitter, does not work. harvesting em from a thunderstorm does not work, what is the frequency of a thunderstorm? without a matched source and detector frequency, there isnt much power available. yes, a stepup transformer does step up voltage, but it drops current at the same amount (turns ratio) and how would anyone make a stepup transformer with enough bandwidth to recieve all em frequencies? a small germanium diode will conduct only a few miliamperes before burning out, a larger germanium diode will not work at high enough frequencies.

 

Coincidence that many scientific inventors in the past has been found killed or dissapearef because of their inventions to get rid of fossil fuels?

Uncanny for me. Will the governments or oil companies take out those scientific discoveries made by these dissapeared people, when green house effect and contamination generated by fossil fuel will be irreversible ?

Conspiracy or not? Really I don't know what to think about these dissapearances.

There is a conspiracy theory about Tesla's demise.

He was working on transmitting electricity without cables - its suspected the "money men" bumped him off because success would have left them no way of billing anyone using it.