Strange forms of Renewable Energy that COULD work!

So energy is a huge relevant issue in today’s modern world. I remember writing a ginormous essay (in 1 night the day before it was due. It turned out great! But sorry I digress,) about renewable energy and its effects on economic, political and social aspects in the world. My father works in Oil and Gas, a chemical engineer by degree and project manager by profession so I’ve heard about the main ways that we obtain oil and natural gases for energy purposes. Obviously, if you have access to the internet (which you must, since you’re reading this), you should know how those main sources (oil, gas, coal) are getting depleted and so, we (the planet) needs to find alternate, more sustainable form of energy that both meets our needs as a human race and also prevents more damage to our planet.

Offshore structures to obtain oil and gas from undersea ventures

But I don’t usually write about something unless it’s going to be both illuminating and humourous! So this isn’t just a boring old blogpost about alternative energy, this is about energy solutions designed by supervillains to take over the world (but they’ll probably fix the problem temporarily but lead us into quite a few more). Evil villains definitely think outside the box and their potential power sources would possibly be considered ridiculous but worse than coal? I think not.

(All links are the research I did. There's more but I didn't want to link every word lol. Don't bother clicking unless you're really curious where I got my info.)

5 Energy Crisis Solutions

1. A battery that runs off of human blood (Not kidding, it exists.)

Mad scientists have searched for years to get power from stolen souls but since that didn’t quite work out for them, they settled on getting electricity from human blood! At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, scientists have invented a strong and flexible battery, powered by blood, which looks like a curled up scab!

This is part of a larger series of batteries called bio-batteries which can run off of a a few bodily fluids (sweat, urine or…tears) All of these can be produced during a human response to fear…wow, Monsters Inc. the Sequel. Also I can't believe all that information is on HowStuffWorks, a predominantly children's science site!

It has the texture of paper and is implanted under the skin but draws electrolytes from your fluids and channels them through nanotexh carbon tubes to create energy (Wouldn’t that dehydrate you? Would you have to be on the drips? Or continuously be drinking H₂O or Mountain Dew or something?)

Apparently, the goal is not to make a huge one and power it with a lake consisting of human victims’ blood but rather to help power medical implants such as pacemakers.

BTW, as creepy as this may sound, the older method (not in current use) was to power those devices using nuclear power but having a little hunk of plutonium inside the batter. As the plutonius decayed, the heat released would power the device. When the patient eventually died, they’d have to ship the pacemaker to Los Alamos to safely dispose the radioactive material.

2. Harvesting human body heat (Not by trapping in pods. I promise.)

The Matrix has taught me a many wonderful things about life (definitely going to be a blogpost in the near future!) but using human heat was not one of them. In Sweden, however,  some engineers watched it and said, “Hey, you know that’s so true! We SHOULD harvest human body heat for our planet’s energy needs! Great idea!”

They don’t, however, round up crowds and shove them into power plants with IVs to sustain them and suck out their heat energy (I don’t know why but evil laugh sounds appropriate) – MuaHaHaHa – these people volunteer themselves. Let me explain, he Stockholm Central Station is a huge train station that acts as a central hub for all Swedish travel and some 250,000 people pass through everyday. According to The Matrix, the human body generate 400BTUs of heat/hour. Multiply that by a quarter million and voila! – A building that stays too hot even in freezing Stockholm.

So instead of opening a window and wasting all that extra heat energy, they installed heat converters in the vents that suck all the extra body heat, heats water and then they send it across the street to heat an office building. Apparently, the air can’t be directly pumped over there because it would smell like sweaty train travellers and Swedish hobos.

Besides completely deducting the station’s heating bill, the office building knocked off 25% of their their bill! This sounds like a really easy method to be used in any Metropolitan city in the world, where there are plenty of packed buildings! Especially now that we’ve reached 7million (although I’m pretty sure that’s not contributing to the Metros too much)

You know what would really work? Pay an unemployed or homeless person to just sit in a container (or pod) and just provide energy. Of course, that might increase the amount of money invested as you would have to entertain them, pay them, benefits and all…Or you could get robots to guard them and make sure they don’t leave. Ever.

3. Volcano Power!

This makes me laugh because every famous supervillain has his evil lair within a volcano where he hides from the law harnessing energy to fuel his death ray while the superhero comes to his rescue right before the eruption, only to throw the guy in jail J The ultimate supervillain symbol from Sauron to Syndrome (The Incredibles).

But, most power plants operate by heating up water until it becomes steam. So if it’s heat you need, why not use the giant hold spewing molten rock from the center of the Earth?

Iceland already provides power to 95% of their population and has plans to start selling this power to other countries soon. These people are taking the very unpronouce-able volcano that screwed up everyone’s air travel earlier and making it work for them!

Even by modest projections, it’s estimated that US could power 25% of their country and for volcanic-activity-heavy countries like Indonesia where 35% of the population doesn’t have electricity, this is a Godsend! The volcanoes in the Indonesia archipelago would produce 4,000 MW of power by 2014.

Context: World’s largest solar plant: 400MW/year and Largest windplant: 800MW/year

Hold on to your horses, reader who thought of galloping off to Eyoihwifwoehoi (something or the other) to make your own power plant…there is some risk. If the volcano erupts, power supply can be interrupted and that’s kinda what volcanos tend to do. And even if it’s not exploding in your face, drilling into the ground and releasing a cloud of super-heated steam that makes your equipment explode and form a crater 100ft deep and 100ft wide is a scenario that is very possible (it has happened several times). But think about it: you’re trying to tame a freaking volcano to serve your energy needs, it’s gonna fight back dammit!

4. Harnessing eel electricity

Ok, so this is more Disney Pixar supervillain than real supervillain (If I can be permitted to call a non-animated movie bad guy that…what’s a real supervillain anyway?) If you were to look at an electric eel and say, “I’m going to put them in a tank and use them to power my lair!,” I would assume you’re a 12 year old. Or Japanese. (Sorry for the racism but you’ll get the reason in a minute.)

At the Kamakura Aquarius just south of Tokyo, they’ve set up a demonstration of a single, huge electric eel powering…a Christmas tree. Yes, they used the evil henchmen in The Little Mermaid to power a Christmas tree. They produce electricity similar to batteries and it works simply by putting them in a tank and when it moves, it generates power. Electrodes feed the current into a Christmas tree and voila! – You’ve got an erratically powered Christmas tree.

Besides getting our super-villain a prince for a husband, our ultimate goal was to light up Christmas trees.

I hope the eel tree’s inventor is joking when he is quoted as saying (perhaps the most uncreative vision of the future in the history of mankind), “If we could gather up all the electric eels from all around the world we would be able to light up an unimaginably large Christmas tree." Solve the global energy crisis? Noooo…Christmas tree!

Well, I suppose it’s better than the alternative of for example, having 10,000 square km pit of electric eels or breeding a Godzilla-sized eel. On second thought, if you were planning on something like that, you wouldn’t advertise it. You’d cover it up by saying you were doing something no one would question. Like say…Christmas. Hmm…

5. A Giant Invisible Energy (Death) Ray

Ok…wires are old technology and physically having to connect your chargerto a power station through cords, power lines and transformers is overly complicated, essentially the same as what has been happening for the last century. Shouldn’t we be able to beam the energy to where we need it? Yes, there are small scale versions of it like phone chargers without plugs but hopefully, someone out there is thinking much much bigger, like huge, right?

Now THAT is a fire hazard.

Yes, this is also true. Scientists have built a laser that can transfer power nearly mile into the sky, a project that was done as part of a NASA contest which awarded teams for innovations in beaming invisible power over distances. The winning team wirelessly beamed enough power to command a robot to climb a 4,300ft cable up to a helicopter. The article doesn’t say if the robot then climbed into the helicopter and threw out the pilot like Robert Patrick in Terminator 2.

Another research team has outlined plans for a colossal solar space sail that would pick up outer space solar winds and beam them to Earth. There’s plenty of energy in space, enough to power Earth many times over! The beaming technology to transmit the mind-boggling amount of energy needs to be perfected and also a few missions in orbit to build the sail. And then, the grand revelation: it’s a Death Star.

So that's it...Renewable energy. Super villains. Hopefully, technology will be used for good. I guess that's a human's most redeemable quality. Hope. So here's hoping...