Using Tornadoes For Good, Not Evil — Green Energy

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

 
Never one to let a good heading get away from me, it’s time to turn the evil power of tornadoes into something good — namely, green energy. And thanks to The Thiel Foundation’s funding program Breakout Labs, a new grant has been awarded to harness the power of atmospheric vortexes.

Tornadoes!

Tornadoes as Green Energy

“The power in a tornado is undisputed,” said Louis Michaud, Canadian engineer and designer of the Atmospheric Vortex Engine (AVE). “My work has established the principles by which we can control and exploit that power to provide clean energy on an unprecedented scale.

“With the funding from Breakout Labs, we are building a prototype in partnership with Lambton College to demonstrate the feasibility and the safety of the atmospheric vortex engine.”

Michaud’s design sees warm or humid air introduced into a circular station wherein it takes the form of a rising vortex which drives multiple turbines.

AVE has several advantages over other green energies: AVE produces no carbon dioxide emissions, nor does it require any storage given that the power can be turned on and off at will simply by altering the flow of warm or humid air.

AVEtec (the name of the company) believes that the cost of energy it could generate might be as low as 3 cents per kilowatt hour, making it easily one of the cheapest forms of energy production.

The AVEtec grant is one of three recently doled out by Breakout Labs this month.

“Our three newest grant recipients–AVEtec, General Genomics, and Siva Therapeutics–are vastly different in their technologies, company strategies, and goals,” said Breakout Labs Executive Director, Lindy Fishburne. “What unites them is ground-breaking science coupled with the passion, vision, and creativity of their founders. We are delighted to bring them into the Breakout Labs community.”


Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.

CleanTechnica Holiday Wish Book

Holiday Wish Book Cover

Click to download.


Our Latest EVObsession Video


I don't like paywalls. You don't like paywalls. Who likes paywalls? Here at CleanTechnica, we implemented a limited paywall for a while, but it always felt wrong — and it was always tough to decide what we should put behind there. In theory, your most exclusive and best content goes behind a paywall. But then fewer people read it!! So, we've decided to completely nix paywalls here at CleanTechnica. But...
 
Like other media companies, we need reader support! If you support us, please chip in a bit monthly to help our team write, edit, and publish 15 cleantech stories a day!
 
Thank you!

Advertisement
 
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.

Joshua S Hill

I'm a Christian, a nerd, a geek, and I believe that we're pretty quickly directing planet-Earth into hell in a handbasket! I also write for Fantasy Book Review (.co.uk), and can be found writing articles for a variety of other sites. Check me out at about.me for more.

Joshua S Hill has 4403 posts and counting. See all posts by Joshua S Hill

7 thoughts on “Using Tornadoes For Good, Not Evil — Green Energy

    • I liked this part from the link…

      “It has not been possible, so far, to make precise measurements with our models which have been handcrafted in a domestic (primitive) way since the quality of these has not been sufficient and accurate instruments have not been available to us.”

      They’ve been at it since 1975. So far no one has seen enough potential to do anything but some crude tinkering around.

      I suspect all this stuff comes down to a simple fact EIIALTEO (energy in is always less than energy out). You can use up some of the incoming energy to make stuff spin, you convert the incoming energy in a more efficient manner, but you can’t create energy out of nothing….

      • it would seem that the primary use for this is infact in replacement to cooling towers,
        in effect what they are doing is creating an artificial chimney out of the water vapour
        once the cyclone was up and running, it would be largely self sustaining – if you could get much energy out of it – perhaps not

        that said, you would think that with the cost of building cooling towers, or worse fan forced radiators (and the energy cost to keep the fans running)

        im trying to think why they havent been used as an alternative to cooling towers. the only thing i can think of is people are scared that they might up and leave the plant and go roaming across the countryside

        • After leaving the tower, what would sustain them? You need a temperarure differential.

  • disregarding use as a power source, it seems like an interesting way of setting up air-conditioning cooling towers.

  • If I where to say what if the energy applied to generate a vortex was constant and increasing what is natures last resort to stop a vortex from going out of control and rampaging the earth naturally there is one this leads to is violent implosion and drastic end (The method that is I’m not so prompt to share sorry for that)but to use this implosions released energy and regenerate it to happen much quicker and more forceful doubling its force along the way to exert more energy output then what was used to make it. The method is critical and so is the way its done which might seem interesting to you. We have to look at vortex’s use in this atmosphere its something simulators miss because there simply not programmed the equation’s are need to determine the last element for success in mastering a vortex.

Comments are closed.