SMARTER STRATEGIES

IdeaSpeeder Readers' Pick: Power from the Magnetosphere

John Jainschigg | Date: 03-19-10 | Comments

The Smarter Technology team congratulates "kixx" for this week's most interesting reader idea.

As reported earlier this week, readers have risen heroically to challenges posed by our IdeaSpeeder idea-sharing-and-voting system. If you're a regular reader of Smarter Technology, you've probably noticed the IdeaSpeeder boxes below certain articles. Each presents a challenge based on the article topic at hand, and invites readers like you to submit ideas and solutions, letting subsequent readers reorder the ideas submitted, pushing their favorites toward the top of the list.

While some readers have exercised their genius responding to our challenges, others have exercised their judgment in evaluating the "goodness" of ideas submitted. For some, that may mean "feasibility," "monetizability," "Turing-completeness" or other notions of concrete value. Or it may simply mean "coolness"�this is not an entirely scientific system. That understood, we've tallied the results and today are naming our readers' pick for "best idea so far." The envelope, please ...

And the award�of reader acclaim and of our gratitude and respect, the aforementioned having no monetary value, express or implied�goes to reader "kixx" (you know who you are), who responded to the IdeaSpeeder challenge posted with Dave Greenfield's article WiFi Power Taking Charge about Airnergy's new product that uses WiFi energy to recharge mobile devices.

We asked: "What other sources of electronic noise might be harvested for power?" Reader kixx wrote: "Why not develop an energy source that utilizes the earth's magnetic field? It is everywhere, not affected by weather, solar, and other RF."

As noted earlier this week, we did a little Wiki-ing around on this idea to judge feasibility (clearly, drawing free power from Earth is a cool idea, so we're fine for intangibles here) and were surprised to quickly find some references to well-understood technologies that might actually make this possible, including adaptations of the Faraday monopolar disk generator and magneto-hydrodynamic techniques.

At first reading, we thought this idea might founder on the difficulty of creating a huge coil of wire around Earth, to act as a stator to Terra's rotor. But a little Wikipedia-ing suggests this may not be an insurmountable problem. Faraday-style monopolar disk generators might prove a workable model (at this cosmic scale, we consider "workable model" to mean "anything that doesn't require us to build a superconducting tunnel from the North to the South Pole"), the Coriolis pseudo-force might be adapted, or the more exotic science of magneto-hydrodynamic generation�done by moving hot gases through a field�might be adapted.

The general consensus of our Board of Examiners (read: "all the physics, math and chemistry people I have on my Skype this morning"), however, is that this is a hard problem. When confronted with the notion, most respondents thought, like us, of the need to move a (large) coil around in the field, or somehow affix one in space around the moving Earth, and figured that the energy required to do this would offset any benefit of power generated.

Still, several folks noted that there are situations where energy is already being expended to do unrelated work, where power generated by motion through Earth's magnetic field might be taken off as a side-benefit (for example, a potential difference tends to develop between the wings of an airplane in flight that might be used for something). The most intriguing idea came from Nicholas Chase, CEO of Internet and 3D developers InterSection Unlimited, who suggested that more benefit might be realized from this idea if we stopped thinking about "generating electricity to charge a conventional battery," per se, and instead rethought the idea of a battery: looking at chemical reactions and thinking about how we might use incidental movement through Earth's magnetic field to change their statistical mechanics, inducing potential difference.

In any case, congratulations to "kixx" for your thought-provoking idea. Keep �em coming, folks!