Increasing fossil-fuel power by 40% with a green, clean tornado turbocharger
Share This article
Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and now a venture capitalist and philanthropist, has decided that harnessing tornadoes is the future of green energy production. In a 500-megawatt fossil-fuel power station, as much as 1000 megawatts of energy is wasted as heat. Controlled tornadoes could produce 200 megawatts of green electricity from that waste heat, almost for free.
Breakout Labs, part of the Thiel Foundation that offers grants to bleeding-edge technologies that are a little too wacky for commercial or governmental investment, has given $300,000 to AVEtec. AVEtec (AVE = Atmospheric Vortex Engine), run by Canadian entrepreneur Louis Michaud, is trying to develop a tornado-power add-on for conventional fossil-fuel power stations. This isn’t as crazy as it sounds.
We can all agree that tornadoes contain a vast amount of energy — but obviously, it’s rather hard to capture that energy when the tornadoes are randomly running rampant across the countryside. Instead, Michaud proposes that power stations are equipped with an Atmospheric Vortex Engine. Instead of venting waste heat into cooling towers, the warm air would instead be blown into the AVE at a sharp angle, causing a swirling, rising vortex — a controlled tornado. The vortex is continually “fed” by the cooler air above it, and by forcefully sucking in warm air at its base. Add a turbine to the AVE, and voilà: Tornado power.
Speaking to the Toronto Star, Michaud says that a 500-megawatt thermal power plant could generate an extra 200 megawatts with an AVE. “That would increase capacity by 40 per cent and produce perfectly green electricity at less than three cents per kilowatt hour,” he says. This is effectively free power — and apparently very safe, too, as the tornado can be instantly turned off by removing the warm air supply. Such a 200-megawatt AVE would be 100 meters (330ft) in diameter, and the resultant tornado would be miles high — pretty darn big, though still quite small compared to tornadoes in the wild.
The next step is to build a working prototype with Lambton College in Ontario. The prototype will be 8 meters (26ft) in diameter, which will generate a one-foot tornado that will power a turbine. It’s also worth noting that Michaud’s AVE isn’t reliant on a fossil-fuel power station: Any source of warm air will do. As you can see in the diagram above, the governing factor of the AVE is the difference between air and ground temperatures — with a little extra heat, to give the tornado a kick-start. That extra heat can come from thermal power stations, but waste industrial heat and solar heat are viable options as well.
[Video via Geek.com]