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.
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| 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.)
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!
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.)
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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.
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| 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?
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| 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...
