A Challenge to the Law

An Irish company has recently placed an advertisement in the Economist challenging the scientific community to disprove their perpetual energy machine. Even their press releases cause a stir. Is this company for real?

A goal of this blog is to bring an understanding of energy flow in ecosystems into the realm of economic study. Though this seems like a perfect subject, this econogineer is very skeptical. Many have called it a scam, but it could be a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the results. Many years ago, I was paid by an investor to look at a perpetual energy machine in Rome, Georgia. This company had also issued challenges and only very slim details. I visited them and got a stack of information. They also told me a Civil Engineering professor at Georgia Tech could find no problem with their assertion that they could produce steam with less energy than the latent heat of vaporization (ie, the energy required to turn water from a liquid state to a gaseous, higher energy state). Their process involved the commonly known phenomenon of cavitation. They literally had money pouring in. However, one look at their apparatus in person revealed the flaw in their logic. They did not account for quality. They were using tap water at 60 psi and producing steam at atmospheric pressure. It takes energy to deliver water at 60 psi; that's part of what you pay in your water bill.

Energy is such a generic word without substantive meaning. It needs qualifiers to be properly compared to other forms. Those qualities are time, space, and power. When and how fast does it produce? Where is it? How does it relate to other forms of energy, that is, what is the transformation to useful forms of energy like electricity.

A joule of sunlight and a joule of electric current have the same amount of energy, yet the electricity is certainly worth more in economic terms. Sunlight is dispersed, electricity can be concentrated in a wire. I can do a lot more with electricity than I can sunlight. One can be transformed into the other, that is, I can turn on a bright light with electrcity or use a solar panel to generate electricity. Each of theses processes will result in losses, i.e., less than one joule. Thus, according to the first two laws of thermodynamics, we cannot return to our original state. There is no such thing as a perpetual energy machine. Steorn refutes the second law. That they ascribe the second law to Sir Isaac Newton (who was responsible for the laws of motion) does not bode well for their thouroughness.

Like the steam engine above, Steorn may have a useful process that converts energy at one form to a more useful form. In our economy, we need all kinds of energy, from sunlight ( a very low quality energy) to human thought ( the highest form of energy). Whatever Steorn has, it will not change the basic dynamics of man's economy. We will still need materials to make things and we will still need all different types of energy and the processes that produce them. They may indeed have a process that will greatly impact the efficiency of many facets of our economy. One of the greatest processes to do just that is the one you are using now, the Internet. It facilitates the movement of knowledge from one person to the next. It has been the greatest impact to our economy since the gasoline engine.

I seem to recall it coming upon us with less mysteriousness.