Unworkable Ideas in Energy and Electric Transportation
It seems like I do an awful lot of raining on others’ parades, but someone needs to sort out good ideas from bad ones. Here’s a great example of something that isn’t theoretically impossible, but is supremely impractical.
There is no doubt that some of your car’s energy is lost as you drive over bumps and go around corners, but capturing it is a viciously unworkable idea.
In fact, this is the conversation I had at an auto show many years ago with a company called “Watt Shocks,” who were there to peddle the idea that instead of dissipating this energy in shock absorbers as heat, insert magnets into them and use the up-and-down motion to induce an electrical current.
Now, of course, no one’s saying you can’t do that, but the rep claimed that this would generate somewhere between 100 and 1000 times more power than was suggested by my calcs. I asked him to forget about my calcs, and transfer this experiment into the real world: take a drive, put your hand on one of the car’s shock absorbers, and see how hot it is. The answer? It’s barely warm.
Yes there are certainly a lot of crackpot ideas. Maybe we should catagorize them:
1. the stuff that is pure scam. Often it pretends to operate on one theory but is perhaps demonstrating a different principal or just playing tricks with human perception.
2. the idea like your shocks that work in theory but can’t give results with sufficient efficiency or scale.
3. Something that is truly unknown. It gives some unexplained results. May be worth looking into to see if we have to modify our theories or create a new class of junk ideas.
I’m sure that shock absorbers could be designed to recover part of the energy which would otherwise be dissipated. However, it seems obvious that the amount of energy recovered would be little more than trivial. The fact that shock absorbers don’t become noticeably warm on ordinary roads makes it clear that there is very little energy to recover.