This well known experiment shows that there is energy hiding in all sorts of places just waiting for us to find it. Not all of it is contained in fossil fuels. In fact a lot of it isn’t.
4 thoughts on “Air Plus Water Plus Metal Cans Equals Electricity”
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Don’t get excited. There is no free lunch. This energy is either coming from human labor or fossil fuels. The gentlemen has created an electric generator that takes a small amount of energy from the falling water or from corrosion of the cans to make a spark.
The traveling water creates an electric field that pushes the electrons around to the capacitive balls above. The 2 paint cans are composed of different metals resulting in different electromotive potentials.
The energy either came from human labor (man lifting a water bucket), or from the fossil fuel energy that was required to smelt the cans in the first place.
I forget some details, but the basic thing is far better for the earth to conserve a BTU or Watt, than to create one through some gimmick.
Jim: If you read my comments on the video you will see that I am not in fact claiming this is “free energy” or anything like that. This could easily be a mountain stream running through something like this, but a much more efficient use of that falling water would be to funnel it through a small water turbine. And yes you will need fossile fuels and/or human power to set up the water turbine, but the clean energy you gain from it over its life time will be much greater.
Same goes for wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal energy etc. There is a lot of energy in nature waiting for us to harness it that has nothing to do with fossil fuel.
Thanks for your response. Calculating embodied energy is tricky. I wish people would study it more.
Clearly the government (and many Americans), still don’t understand that instead of an income tax, we need a carbon tax. That would reveal the amount of energy in things, and would result in real conservation.
The government says a carbon tax would hurt our prosperity. I think we need to redefine prosperity.
Jim: I fully agree, taking the most wasteful products will force the market to make more efficient ones, it is simple economics. Right now there are few market forces causing the creation of sustainable designs, because most of the negative costs of making crap is distributed to the community as a whole.
No one companies pays for beach erosion due to global warming, so they don’t care if there products use a lot of energy and cause more coal to be burned.
If the full cost of fixing all the problems caused by burning fossil fuels was tacked on to the price of those fuels, they would be astronomically expensive. Wind turbines and solar panels would look almost free in comparison.