Free energy or hoax?

[retina]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

Not to be too much of a nitpick, but I ran across a 2100AH battery here.

Okay, I was meaning the largest for a D-cell. Anyhow, doesn't really matter, the battery should not be there at all.

BUT ...

I just now had a revelation. All of Steorn's claims are true. Here is why.

They have always claimed free, clean constant energy right? So with this demo the 'clean' and 'constant' parts are already shown (I suppose) so that just leaves the 'free' part to prove, right?

Well here is the revelation: The power is free because Steorn, out of the goodness of their (and their investors) hearts, will provide batteries to everyone for free, in perpetuity.

And I suppose it will all be paid for by advertising on the batteries (and on the packaging also I guess). That must be the secret.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

He's dead now all the same.

There is a positive benefit from radiation exposure.
http://www.coherentspace.info/radiat...sis/index.html


Toward the low energy reactions:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Lon...xcessheata.pdf
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/BushBFheliumprod.pdf
http://www.world-mysteries.com/sci_coldfusion.htm

Oh well, you got the right answer eventually.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asi...ic/8443295.stm

Paul

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by xilman

Oh well, you got the right answer eventually.

I was correct within 1.25%. 1066, 1067 same thing right?

[Spherical Cow]

"The Final Demo" by the Steorn group is scheduled for January 30th- Sell your stock in energy companies...


http://www.steorn.com/

Norm

[retina]

1600 GMT, it would seem, the world will see final proof. About 2 hours+ from now. Presumably Steorn expect this "proof" to be a positive thing for them.

The thing I am curious about is how they will "adjust" the displays, scopes, meters and things to show what they need them to show.

[cheesehead]

So, what happened? I don't see anything on the Steorn site.

[retina]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

So, what happened? I don't see anything on the Steorn site.

Total farce as expected. I didn't think it worthwhile to report actually. They showed absolutely no proof whatsoever. Just lots of random oscilloscope traces and handwaving. For some inexplicable reason they couldn't even place a simple ammeter in one of the battery terminal connections. I wonder why?

Hey, but you can waste spend €419 and get the SKDB to prove them wrong. Although I would lose all respect for anyone that actually gives them money to further their scam. Best to let the previous bunch of morons investors sue them for fraud.

[cheesehead]

Despite my having explained to a waitress earlier today that the reason I called her attention to a $4 error in my favor was that "I hate it when the numbers don't add up", I actually am disappointed in this case that Steorn didn't come up with something I couldn't have predicted.

[davieddy]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

Despite my having explained to a waitress earlier today that the reason I called her attention to a $4 error in my favor was that "I hate it when the numbers don't add up",.....

In case she thought you were just flirting?

[retina]

Not sure if anyone is really interested but here goes anyway ...

From what has come out of Steorn it appears that this is their claim:

All power used to spin the rotor and drive current through the wires and move the air and make sound etc. etc. etc. comes from the battery and goes into heat/motion/sound/whatever. Okay fine so far I guess, standard motor just like normal. But here is where the FE claim is; The pick-up coils on the outside induce no feedback (i.e no counter EMF at all) into the rotor, thus any load on the pick-ups does not alter the rotor load.

So what they claim is that 100% of the battery power goes into heat/noise/etc. and the extra power from the pick-up coils is free. But the output power figures are so tiny that it is hard to prove anything. A slight mis-calibration (deliberate or not) in any part of the measuring equipment could swing your figures from OU (over unity) to UU (under unity) very easily. Figures like 100% input and 101% output, where 100% is heat/noise/stuff and the extra 1% is the "free" current from the pick-up coils.

Strangely enough they never ever put a load on the coils to actually prove anything. They shorted them out and then tried to measure the tiny current with a probe. They multiply that current by a figure they entered into the scope (they claim it is the DC resistance of the coil but never showed any measurement of that). And then used a scope to integrate the currents and show some output "power". While doing this they measure the input current and attempt to show that as the coils are brought closer that the input current remains constant, thus, according to them, proof of no extra load at the input. But you have to consider how would the input current be perceived. Since the output is so tiny compared to the input that means that if the input were to change it would be such a small increase in the beam height (~1%) that it can easily be missed (especially if one does not wish break the spell and thus is blind to any change).

[ewmayer]

Thread Hijack - or better, friendly takeover by way of hopefully-productive redicrect:

60 Minutes had a feature last night on this Silicon Valley fuel-cell-based clean-tech startup, Bloom Energy ... at first glance the company`s claims to have solved multiple longstanding issues related to use of fuel cells fro wide-scale commercial power generation seem like Steorn-like pie-in-the-sky claims, especially as Bloom was also highly secretive until now. But then one notices the sheer amount of VC funding they`ve raised from some very non-stupid venture players (like John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins), and more importantly, the fact that some very non-stupid large companies have been using the technology in the field, and this starts sounding like it might be the real deal:

Is K.R. Sridhar’s 'magic box' ready for prime time?: The Bloom Energy CEO is finally unveiling his entry in the fuel-cell arena after years of playing it close to the vest.

K.R. Sridhar looks nervous. The CEO of Bloom Energy, the much-hyped fuel cell start-up, sits in a conference room preparing to show off his magical “Bloom Box” for the first time in public. The 49-year-old scientist-turned entrepreneur has raised $400 million in venture capital for his Sunnyvale, California company, but until now Sridhar has revealed almost nothing about what his company has actually produced since it launched eight years ago.

“In our eight-year history, this is the first time I’m sitting down with anybody who’s not wearing a Bloom badge,” he says with a laugh. “So it’s a big deal.”

...
Those dark spots on photos of earth taken from outer space? Ablaze with light. That old, unreliable grid mostly powered by dirty coal? Obsolete, since Bloom boxes are basically tiny power plants installed right in your back yard, next to the dumpster at your corporate campus, or at your local electric-car charging station – though they can also be connected to an electrical grid just like your PC connects to the Internet. Hydrocarbons such as natural gas or biofuel (stored in an adjacent tank) are pumped into the Bloom Box – ceramic plates stacked atop each other to form modules that can be assembled into a unit of any size – and out comes abundant, reliable, cleaner electricity. The company says the unit does not vibrate, emits no sound, and has no smell.

Sridhar, an India-born PhD who once led a team of NASA scientists trying to develop the technology to sustain life on Mars, holds one of the modules in his hand. Stacking them into a bread loaf-sized unit, he says, can produce one kilowatt of electricity, enough to power an American home. Sridhar explains that it has taken so long to produce this contraption because he is building not just a company but an entire industry. “You are used to market sizes that start with a ‘B’,” he told venture capitalists when the company launched in 2002. “This is a market size that starts with a ‘T’.”

Alas, the fuel cell industry – for all the genuine promise and outrageous claims of the last 50 years – is still one with profit margins that start not with “T,” “B,” or even “M,” but with a minus sign. Bloom lost $85 million in 2008, according to venture capitalists that have seen its business plan, roughly on par with other fuel-cell companies building energy boxes much like Bloom’s. The reason is simple: fuel cells are still too expensive – at least until there is a market to produce them on a mass scale.

Google told Fortune that it has a 400 kilowatt installation from Bloom at its headquarters in Mountain View, California. But the real test, analysts say, is whether Google feels confident enough to use Bloom boxes to power its vast server farms upon which its business depends.

“I definitely think Bloom is over-hyped,” says Jacob Grose, senior analyst at Lux Research, which specializes in emerging technologies, though he stresses that he hasn’t seen the soon-to-be-unveiled Bloom box. “What Bloom offers does not seem to be unique – other fuel-cell companies are doing very similar things. The real question is whether Bloom has unlocked the secret of how to make these things cheap, and I’m very skeptical of that.”

My Comment: In the 60 Minutes piece last night, Sridhar showed the [alleged] key steps in the thin-film process he uses to make the paper-thin plates which form the heart of the company`s fuel-cell technology, and claims that it will become much cheaper as the production scale gets ramped up ... key is that the technology uses no exotic/expensive materials or ultra-tricky manufacturing processes.

In the same piece, a top exec at eBay showed off their Bloom installation - about a dozen 1m x 1m x 2m boxes, each of which costs $700K (with about half that covered by state and federal subsidies) in a compact, quiet array on the front lawn - and said that eBay is saving on the order of $100k per month thanks to the technology. That means the eBay system - assuming it lives up to its advertised 30+ year life span - will pay for itself in under a decade. That is already a ROI competitive with state-subsidized solar, and again, the install-planning effort and footprint are much better than for solar. Key questions still remain about the longevity and long-term reliability of the tech, but Sridhar was very open in the 60Minutes piece about some of the problems they've had with field installs - air filters getting clogged due to bad air near major thoroughfares, electrical glitches, and the like.

For those about to say, "but it still puts out CO2!" ... yes, but the elimination of (most of the) transmission losses associated with standard-grid power roughly cuts the CO2-per-watt in half.

I only *hope* this comes anywhere close to living up to the hype, and doesn't end up being remembered like Kleiner-Perkins' last "Next Big Thing", the ill-fated, overhyped Segway.