Technology

The inventor/founder at the center of the article, Lonnie Johnson, was on the team at JPL that designed and implemented the thermoelectric generators (heated by radioactive decay from plutonium-238 pellets) on the Galileo spacecraft sent to Jupiter. So I would expect that he's more familiar with the thermodynamic and engineering challenges than even a typical expert.

The PR fluff put out by the company mentions that the theoretical basis for this specific type of generator was worked out a while ago but needed materials science to advance to the point where this type of generator can be thermodynamically and commercially feasible.

Looking at how this generator is supposed to work, it's interesting in that it does rely on the movement of fluid, but is supposed to be a totally closed loop, to be a bit different than the pure solid state, semiconductor-based Seebeck generators that are already well known.

The other area talked about in this article is that they believe that it can be effective with lower temperature differentials than any previous technology, which might make a huge difference in whether it can be deployed to more useful places and thereby make it economically feasible more easily than prior concepts.

In the end, if these generators can output some electric voltage/current, it might just take on similar generation characteristics as photovoltaics, which could mean that hooking these up to the grid could draw on some of the lessons learned from the rise of grid scale solar.

Thank you. I made a comment about it being a shame that we don't capture the waste heat from some process a while back and someone quipped something like "2nd law of thermodynamics moment". I went and did some reading, but couldn't make sense of it. Your explanation makes sense.

Great write-up. I’m so glad my college thermodynamics classes armed me with proper skepticism.

Assuming it’s cheap and reliable, exploiting geothermal resources for a local power solution would be useful in some places, I would think.

The laws of physics didn't need breaking when the heat pump was invented to circumvent theoretical limits. Maybe its that kind of deal. He has a phenomenal track record, might be worth waiting for.

Yeah converting waste heat into useful energy sounds very very much like “making entropy go down.” We know we can make entropy go down in one spot by increasing it even more in others. But for them to do that here… they’d be turning high entropy into low entropy PLUS more high entropy, which sounds circularly self-fueling or essentially a perpetual motion machine.

Most of our electrical generation capabilities use heat at some point to boil water, but what makes that work is water’s phase change behavior, accessible temperature for that phase exchange, and water’s ubiquity. If he can find another water that does something equally useful but at lower temperatures, without exotic materials… I mean John Galt can fuck right off.

If they can pull this off: amazing. But it sounds very much like a quixotic adventure for a legendary inventor’s final days. Someone call me when they have something applicable.

Yes, even without ai it's better for people to move away from gas. Electric cars, heating and cooking dinner is all moving to electricity.

Hypothetically, any energy harvested from a zero-emission strategy might at least displace combusting some hydrocarbons.

The company describes this generator as a solid state device, but the diagrams show the reliance on fluid/flow of hydrogen between the hot side and the cold side for moving some protons around. That seems to be something in between the semiconductor-based solid state thermoelectric generators that are already commonly understood and some kind of generator with moving solid parts.

It still seems like a low maintenance solution to have a closed loop of hydrogen, but that seems like a potential maintenance/failure point, as well, to rely on the chamber to remain filled with hydrogen gas.

I don't disagree, but the article also mentioned that they've already sold their first commercial deployment so I don't think it's entirely vaporware..?

It is scalding hot, but I think the key takeaway is that it's not hot enough to boil into steam, which is our current go-to for harvesting energy from heat.

So after you do your steam turbine and you are left with not-quite boiling water, by today's standards it is useless for further harvesting for electricity. If this article is as-advertised (a big if), then we can harvest more, adding efficiency to any process that boils water to turn a turbine.

I hate this shit as well. People use "The Earth" to make it sound good for the environment, but it's actually just human greed we're always talking about. Take sustainability for example, you ask teens about it, and a lot of them will say it's about saving the environment. It's not. It's about trying to sustain capitalism and our consumerist lifestyle to go on forever while pretending to give a fuck about the environment.