permaculture

[John Schinnerer <john@eco-living.net>]

Aloha,

FWIW...before anyone invests their retirement savings in this...

> Lagadonis said tests have generated 0.8 volts to 1.2 volts by driving  
> an aluminum roofing nail half an inch into a tree attached to a  
> copper water pipe driven 7 inches into the ground.

All those kids' science books usually use a lemon instead of a tree...so 
lemon trees ought to work really great...just wire the lemons right 
there on the tree instead of picking them first...not much use for cold 
climates though, where the need for the energy is greater...

More seriously though...of course they're getting a voltage.  Put any 
two dissimilar metals in some sort of electrolyte and you'll get a voltage.

Here it's aluminium and copper, and the electrolyte is the moisture in 
tree and ground, which is not pure water, so it'll conduct to some degree.

> But the
> electricity is useless because it’s unstable and fluctuates.

Well doh! The electrolyte quality and quantity is pretty darn variable 
in this setup.  Of course it fluctuates.

Since all they're really doing is making a battery out of dissimilar 
metals placed in an electrolyte, I suspect any refinements to their 
system will end up reinventing a battery.
Or at least lead them to notice (could they really not realize this 
already?!!?) that they're just making a battery...

> “It’s a renewable source and it’s an unlimited source,” he said.  

It's neither.  It's a battery like the lemon-penny-roofing nail 
childhood science experiment (unless there's some secret something 
somewhere besides the metals and the tree and soil moisture that they're 
not telling about here).
These guys clearly flunked lower division college physics.  Or skipped 
it and went surfing.  Or something.
Unless they're really just more "free energy" folks in a new disguise, 
thinking that having a tree as an element in the electrolyte will 
somehow create "more" or "unlimited" electricity than if it were a lemon 
- or a beaker of sulfuric acid - etc. etc.

It would amaze me that anyone would invest in something like this 
without just doing some simple fact-finding...but since the massive 
investments in the smoke and mirrors of the dot-com boom-bust and the 
current rush on unproven unapproved potentially apocalyptic 
biotechnology, nothing much amazes me investment-wise any more.

> “It’s virtually untapped. The issue is clean energy and it’s readily  
> available. There are trees everywhere.”

See above...as the man said,

> Manwell said his skepticism is science-based.
>
> “There’s a fundamental law of physics,” he said. “The energy has to  
> come from somewhere.”

Yeah, TANSTAAFL to be sure.
Electrodes and/or electrolytes get depleted sooner or later, one way or 
another.  Entropy does appear to describe what happens in the world of 
inorganic matter.  The fact that the tree elements are organic (living 
systems) doesn't exempt this system from that entirely.  The tree is 
used as an element of the electrolyte so there will be consequences of 
some sort.  Exactly what I can't imagine yet.

Luckily we are (and are of) organic matter, and permaculture 
fundamentally recognizes that until our sun starts sputtering, the 
entropy story of inorganic physics does not apply to living systems in 
our context.  Trees do incredible favors for us just by being what they 
are (when we let them)...though I doubt making electricity is going to 
be one of them.

However, to say that the "laws" of physics are why the energy has to 
come from somewhere or why a battery does what it does or why you fall 
downwards when you jump off a cliff is a mistake.

"Physics" is not the *reason* for any of these consequences - it is 
simply an explanation (one of an infinite number of possible 
explanations) of human observations.

Now, generating (maple, etc.) syrup from (maple, etc.) trees - *there's* 
a proven technology!

:-)
John S.


--

John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
------------------------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Whole Systems Design Services
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