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  • From: John Schinnerer <john@eco-living.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Startup hopes to tap electricity from trees
  • Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2006 20:49:14 -1000

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
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Whole Systems Design Services
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