Thursday 31 December 2015

Power

I was just thinking about energy and thought of one of those "sounds stupid now but might work" type of things.

Imagine the energy we use actually gets stored not in lithium batteries but instead was simply a huge weight stored off the ground, hey if it also captured water in it then we'd be getting more energy still for free.  So towns have tall towers with many large weights that get hoisted up in order to store power and released through a geared dynamo of some sort to convert it to electricity, each house could have it's own tower and weight.  People could earn money by lifting the weights by some sort of winch and the amount of energy any one place had would be totally visible from the height of the weight.  By making the energy usage visible to everyone maybe we'd stop leaving office machines on standby or all lights on in an office block or leave the tv on when we go into another room because we intend to come back but something distracts us.

Prisoners could maybe get some sort of allowance if they helped to raise the weights and we could end up in a pay as you go/ get paid as you go sort of idea whereby you needed some cash so popped into a booth to raise the town weight a little.  Imagine your energy is low so you pop next door, not to borrow some sugar but to borrow some of the potential energy they have.  I am sure not all needs could be met by this so in the evening every tower could draw energy slowly from the grid in order to raise their weights.

It's one of those stupid ideas that may have legs, maybe I should do some maths on it :) I vaguely remember the guy who pioneered the clockwork radio used a large weight suspended from a tree for one of his radios once.

What if you knew it was going to rain, you could hoist up an empty container and let all the rain landign on the house roof drain into it, extra weight means more energy right?  Not sure how much of a bonus you'd get so the empty container would have to be "as well as" the weight rather than instead of.
 
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