8 Wacky Forms of Alternative Energy

At Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, researchers are working on a novel, albeit somewhat distasteful, alternative to fossil fuels. They’ve developed a state-of-the-art toilet for use in developing countries that employs microwaves to chemically alter human waste into syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. This syngas can then be used in stacks of fuel cells to generate electricity. Hypothetically, one toilet could generate enough juice to power several village households, freeing them from dependence on coal or oil.

At first glance, Delft’s scheme to turn poop into power may seem a bit daft. But drastic times call for drastic measures, and many people categorize the state of our environment as drastic. We live on a planet of finite resources — some of which are crucial to our survival, and others that harm the environment every time we use them.

Rather than wait for the oil wells to run dry and coastal cities to disappear beneath rising sea levels, many people are looking ahead to cleaner alternative sources of energy. Some of these energy sources, like solar power, hybrid-electric vehicles and small, hand-powered gadgets have already caught on. Others, however, like feces-fueled water heaters, may take a little getting used to.

Here, for your reading enjoyment, are 10 of the wackier ideas for alternative energy. Some of them are already available; others need a few more trial runs before they hit the market. Either way, if you’re reading this during a self-imposed Earth Hour, hand-crank your flashlight and prepare to be surprised — or even amused.

1. Muscle Power

When you’re at the gym, does your mind ever drift off to ponder the perils of the planet? Do you feel a bit of remorse as your legs pound away on an electric machine that goes nowhere, while the ice-cold air conditioner blows down on your neck? OK — so most likely, you’re probably thinking more about the amount of calories you’re burning. But if you’re one of the more eco-conscious athletes out there, you may soon be able to let those concerns melt away with the pounds.

Several innovative gyms are popping up that convert human energy into useable electricity. One of them, in Hong Kong, has exercise machines that look perfectly ordinary from the outside, but have generators inside that create energy from movement. So while you’re busy sweating it out, your efforts are creating electricity to power the exercise console and supplement the electrical juice it takes to keep the overhead lights on. The owner of the gym maintains that the average person can generate about 50 watts of electricity per hour on the machines. So, unless you like running in the dark, you better get moving.

Pedal generators like the Pedal-A-Watt bike stand operate on a similar concept but are more powerful. A person in top condition can generate 500 watts of power, while someone in couch-potato condition could generate around 150 watts. Although that may not seem like much, that’s enough to power two laptops, two fluorescent light bulbs and a cell phone — as long as you maintain that pedaling.

The Pedal-A-Watt bike stand, which works by powering a generator with the movement of the bike’s rear wheel, comes with an optional PowerPak that stores the energy you create for later use. The PowerPak has an outlet where you can plug in and power any appliance that runs on less than 400 watts of electricity. For a frame of reference, a large television uses around 200 watts, a stereo 20 watts, a desktop computer 75 watts and a refrigerator 700 watts.

2. Piezoelectricity

Everywhere you look, people have their heads down, vigorously texting away as though their lives depended on it. Americans sent a whopping 12.5 billion text messages in just one month in 2006, and cell phone users in the United Kingdom send out one billion a week. Admit it — sometimes that obsession with text messaging can be annoying, but what if each of those finger taps could generate power?

That’s just the idea behind Push to Charge, one of the innovative entries into the 2023 Greener Gadgets Design Competition. The concept relies on piezoelectricity, which is a fancy way of describing the way some metals generate electricity when hit. (Electric cigarette lighters use piezoelectric crystals.)

The Push-to-Charge cell phone would feature plastic buttons sitting atop a layer of hard metal. The bottommost layer would be made out of piezoelectric crystals, so that each time you pressed a button, the hard metal directly underneath it would hit the underlying crystal like a hammer, creating a small amount of voltage. Small wires located between the layers would convey the charge to a battery for storage.

The electricity generated by hitting just one button would be miniscule — an estimated 0.5 watts, according to the inventor. But when you add up all the buttons required to send a single text message and multiply that by the number of text messages sent each day, that’s quite a lot of wattage.

The same technology could be used in any other product that features buttons, including computer keyboards and video games. If all the HowStuffWorks writers had their computers hooked up to such a device, the office probably wouldn’t need to pay any power bills. You have to admit that generating electricity simply by typing on a keyboard or keeping in touch with your friends is a pretty bright idea.

3. Hot Air as Fuel

Anyone who lives in an attic apartment will tell you: Heat rises. But Australian entrepreneur Roger Davey has proposed using this simple fact of physics to create vast amounts of clean energy without burning any carbon fuels.

Davey’s company, EnviroMission, wants to build a massive, 2,600-foot-tall (792.5-meter-tall) structure called a solar updraft tower in the Arizona desert [source: Almasy]. Instead of relying on solar panels to convert the sun’s energy to electricity, the solar updraft tower would use a large, translucent sloping canopy, about as wide as a football field, to trap the sun’s heat like a greenhouse. The hot air in the tent would reach a scorching 194 degrees Fahrenheit (90 degrees Celsius) and would flow into and up through the tower. As it rose, it would turn 32 turbines, spinning them fast enough to power generators and produce 200 megawatts of electricity per day, enough to provide power to 100,000 households.

The concept has been demonstrated already on a smaller, experimental scale. In the early 1980s, a German construction company, Schlaich, Bergermann and Partner, built an iron tower capable of generating 50 kilowatts of energy on the Spanish plains, and operated it successfully seven years until its support cables broke during a storm. EnviroMission’s improved $750 million design calls for the tower to be built from sturdier, more resilient steel and cement, which wouldn’t need to depend on support cables, and company officials say it would last for 80 years, far longer than the average life of most conventional solar-generating facilities. According to EnviroMission, which already has worked a deal to resell its electricity to a southern California utility company, the small amount of carbon pollution created by the manufacture and shipment of the cement and other materials needed to build the tower would be offset after two-and-a-half years of power generation. A similar project also is being developed by a company in China.

4. Floating Wind Farms in the Middle of the Ocean

There’s been plenty of talk of developing offshore wind farms to supply electricity, but as the chronically-delayed effort to build the CapeWind project in Nantucket Sound demonstrates, it’s not that easy to convince people in coastal areas that wind turbines won’t mar the natural beauty of their surroundings or damage delicate marine ecosystems [source: Lindsay]. That’s why the ultimate solution may be to put wind farms hundreds of miles from coastlines, conveniently out of view, and to have them float on the surface of the water, tethered rather than attached to a structure to the ocean floor.

In addition to being less obtrusive, floating wind turbines have a much greater potential to generate power. They can capture the energy of winds in the open ocean, which can reach speeds at least twice as fast as winds near land [source: Economist]. Some reports suggest that wind farms could provide up to 15 percent of the world’s future energy needs.

In late 2011, the first such offshore floating wind farm, a $30 million prototype called WindFloat, was put in place 217 miles (349 kilometers) off the coast of Portugal. It uses a 2-megawatt turbine manufactured by a Danish company, Vestas, which is bolted onto a triangular floating platform made by Seattle-based Principle Power. The platform is moored with four lines, two of which are connected to the column stabilizing the turbine, which helps to reduce excess motion. As the wind shifts direction and places loads on the turbine and foundation, pumps will shift ballast water between chambers in the platform, enabling the installation to cope with more powerful offshore weather. As Antonio Vidigal, CEO of EDP Inovacao, one of the partners in the project, told Scientific American: “The deep ocean is the next big energy frontier”.

5. Kites Attached to Ocean-going Ships

Here’s another alternative energy scheme that would be deployed in the middle of the ocean. While most of us landlubbers think of global warming as a problem caused by coal power plants and automobile exhaust, cargo ships plying the seas spew about 2.7 percent of the world’s manmade greenhouse-gas emissions, according to the International Maritime Organization. That works out to about 870 million tons of climate-altering pollution.

Any technology that could help ships to reach their destinations without burning as much fuel would be a big plus. That’s why in recent years some visionaries have been trying to revive wind power, a method of ship propulsion that saw its heyday in the mid-1800s, as a way to augment large cargo ships’ carbon-burning engines. In the mid-2000s, one company proposed outfitting freighters with gigantic, 13,000-square-foot (1,207-square-meter) kites, which would fly a thousand or so feet (300 meters) above the ship and help pull it along. By one estimate, such a device could reduce a ship’s consumption of diesel fuel by as much as 25 percent, which not only would significantly reduce its carbon output into the atmosphere, but possibly save in excess of $1 million in fuel costs for the biggest ships annually.

In 2008, 10,000-ton container ship MS Beluga Skysails became the first to use auxiliary kite power, attaching a 160-square-meter (1,722-square-foot) kite 300 meters (984.2 feet) above its bow on a voyage from a German port to Venezuela. The ship managed to cut its diesel fuel expenditures by 10 to 15 percent, and saved between $1,000 and $1,500 per day in the course of the two-week trip. The Beluga Group, the ship’s parent company, hopes to eventually use kites to slash its fuel bills by 20 percent.

Why not sails?

If you’re wondering why a traditional sailboat couldn’t do the same job a kite could, you’re not alone. It’s a common question. But according to Treehugger.com, tests have proven that kite systems can deliver more than five times the performance per square meter of sail.

6. Super Small Nuclear Reactors

You’ve heard of tenants getting eviction notices for not paying rent or for making too much noise. But in 2011, a 31-year-old Swedish man named Richard Handl became possibly the first apartment renter in history to get in hot water with his landlord for trying to build a nuclear reactor in his kitchen.

Handl, who told a local newspaper that he’d been interested in nuclear physics since his was in his teens, spent about $950 to acquire the parts and materials he needed to build a DIY nuke, and amassed the necessary quantity of radium by buying luminous clock hands on eBay for a few bucks apiece. He also extracted thorium oxide, another ingredient, from Coleman gas lanterns, and built a crude neutron gun by inserting a small glass pipe inside a plastic pill bottle and covering it with lead. (In case anyone else wanted to emulate him, Handl dutifully documented all these details in his “Richard’s Reactor” blog.) But when the amateur nuclear engineer contacted government officials to make sure he wasn’t breaking any laws, the government sent police to raid his home and seize the DIY reactor.

Nevertheless, our Swedish friend may have been onto something. Nuclear power, which generates energy with only tiny amounts of greenhouse emissions, was enjoying an image upgrade until an earthquake caused a catastrophic accident at a Japanese nuclear complex outside Tokyo in March 2011. But even if big nuke plants seem scary, what about smaller, more easily contained units? Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed a design for a reactor the size of a hot tub that could generate enough electricity to power 20,000 homes. One problem: At $25 million apiece, the price is a bit too steep to justify putting one out on the backyard deck. Another Chicago-based outfit reportedly has been trying to develop an even smaller nuke, this one the size of a microwave oven.

7. Reprocessing Coffee Grounds into Biodiesel

That morning cup of Joe that helps fuel us for the day ahead could soon also help propel trucks as well. In 2009, University of Nevada-Reno engineering professor Mano Misra, known around the lab for his coffee consumption, noticed the sheen of oil floating on top of a cup of brew that had cooled. A light bulb went off in Misra’s caffeinated brain, and he asked a couple of students to work on a project to investigate whether coffee oil could be a feedstock for biodiesel.

The students determined that, depending on the particular bean used in the brew, coffee grounds can contain as much as 20 percent oil, and that it has an unusually high oxidative stability (which means it won’t break down when exposed to oxygen and therefore gunk up fuel lines). They subsequently developed a method to remove the sulfur found in coffee biodiesel, which comes from the volcanic soils in the mountainous regions where coffee generally is grown. The resulting fuel was sufficient to meet the standards set by ASTM International, an international testing organization, for biodiesel.

The researchers estimate that if all the waste grounds generated by the world’s coffee drinkers were gathered and reprocessed, the yield would amount to 2.9 million gallons of diesel fuel each year. Alternatively, the coffee grounds could be converted to fuel pellets. If all of the leftover grounds from Starbucks were reprocessed, they would produce 89,000 tons of such fuel pellets annually, enough to generate millions of dollars in revenue for the coffee-shop chain, as well as help counter rising fuel costs for trucking companies.

8. Orbiting Mirrors to Transmit Solar Energy

You’ve probably witnessed the glee children experience when they see their reflection in one of those shiny mirrored balloons that are popular at birthday parties. Now, imagine an array of enormous versions of those party balloons — perhaps as large as a mile in diameter — deployed in geostationary orbit around Earth. Could they provide a possible answer to the world’s energy shortage and climate-change woes?

In a 2007 article, the late Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineering professor William F. Schreiber proposed launching into orbit a fleet of such balloons, which would be activated by remote control to unfold and inflate. As the Earth’s position changed with respect to the sun, the spherical mirrors would be adjusted continuously to catch and focus solar energy and transmit it in concentrated beams to receiving stations on Earth. At those receiving stations, that solar energy would be used to heat water into steam and drive turbines to generate electricity.

“The balloon approach is very attractive because it enables focus to be controlled by pressure [inside the balloon], rather than by making and then placing into orbit a very precise mirror,” Schreiber wrote. While Schreiber’s idea for using giant shiny balloons may sound a bit outré, scientists increasingly have been looking at the possibility of using satellites to harvest solar power and transmit it to Earth. A study group from the Paris-based International Academy of Astronautics recently proclaimed: “It is clear that solar power delivered from space could play a tremendously important role in meeting the global need for energy during the 21st Century.” And U.S. Air Force Col. Michael Smith, the director of the Pentagon’s Center for Strategy and Technology, recently noted that the concept has the potential to supply safe, clean energy to the entire planet “if we can make it work”.