In Lakehurst NJ at around 7 PM on the 3rd of November my house began shaking. About 9 PM the hurricane named Sandy began hugging my house, causing the drywall ceiling to move up and down an inch or two, the windows to rattle, and the walls to sway. I opened the front door and the shaking and swaying just stopped, pressure differentials are a cool and scary thing. Fifteen minutes later everything went dark for a week. My week of darkness ended seven days and one hour later, during that time thoughts about how to generate energy cheaply ran through my head …
I spent a day writing down every type of energy generation technology I could think of. The list was ~120 devices and techniques long. It included crazy concepts from the free energy world. After crossing out the repeats I had about 100 energy concepts to work with. After crossing ground based carbon devices off the list that number ended up 59. That number returned to over 60 when the realization struck that natural gas fired systems will play a role if the gas is renewable sources like generated methane and hydrogen. After crossing off things like Cold Fusion, cold fog, and Tesla based craziness, and all the odd ball crap, there were only about 25 remaining.
Taking those 25 and running them through this filter …
Create a device to generate clean, renewable energy 24 hours a day, with a minimum of five days of storage capacity, an LCOE (Levelised Cost of Energy) below 20 dollars per megawatt hour, a life span of over 20 years, that can be mass produced in a high speed manner using pre-1970’s technology.
I ended up with twelve possible solutions, 8 of which I have been refining the designs of for the past several years. After discounting high temperature, high pressure, and radioactive solutions the final list was two devices.
- Solar thermal LTD Rankine cycle
- Solar thermal LTD (Low Temperature Differential) Stirling
More Later …