3 ms·
Yeah, the effectiveness of wide area water collection is why your suggestion is 'stupid'. That's ok. Where it's possibly not stupid is in the comment you linked
by throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
Yeah, the effectiveness of wide area water collection is why your suggestion is 'stupid'. That's ok. Where it's possibly not stupid is in the comment you linked to "...as energy is linear with height"
Sure potential energy is linear with height, but energy conversion efficiency is I think non-linear. You can I think collect more than 10x useful energy from an object that is 10x as hot. Equally I suspect you can get more than 10x useful energy from a column of water 10 miles high than from a column of water 1 mile high.
I'm pretty sure your idea won't work but that doesn't mean it can't possibly work. It's more likely harvesting wind energy via kites (as has been proposed) is more realistic, but still, I don't like dismissing dumb ideas. Sometimes they can be made useful.
- londons_explore 7y ago> Equally I suspect you can get more than 10x useful energy from a column of water 10 miles high than from a column of water 1 mile high. For a given flow rate, no. High pressure water can be fairly efficiently converted to electrical energy, which itself can fairly efficiently be converted between low voltage+high current to high voltage+low current. All the conversions are linear and well understood - there is no magic squared here to make this idea magic.
- throwaway_pdp09 7y agoOK, you sound like an expert (not sarcasm) so if I may (and please note I never suggested a squaring relationship), > High pressure water can be fairly efficiently converted... And lower pressure less efficiently converted? Therefore the higher the column, the higher the pressure and the better the efficiency of the conversion?