Taming Tornadoes To Power Cities
by Justin Thomas, Virginia 
on 07.24.07
It sounds implausible, but researchers in Canada are testing the idea of creating man-made tornadoes to generate clean power. The principle behind it is simple: when heat rises it creates temperature differential, and the air starts to swirl. To make an artificial tornado you would build a "vortex building". Clean Break explains: Heated water from a power plant that would normally go to a cooling tower would instead be diverted to the vortex building to produce hot air. This would create the beginnings of a whirlwind. As the hot air rises it gathers energy and creates a vortex that reaches higher and higher into the atmosphere.
At a certain point the fans pushing the hot air into the vortex are turned off. The vortex, now hungry for more heated air, begins to suck in the air on its own. Suddenly, what were fans now become turbines that spin as the air is drawn in. The turbines are connected to generators that produce clean electricity as long as a constant source of waste heat is provided to feed the vortex, which at this point is a full-fledged tornado stretching into the troposphere.
This type of power station would produce 200 megawatts, or enough energy to power 200,000 homes.
Louis Michaud, the inventor of this scenario, has spent the last four decades of his life examining the feasibility of creating tornadoes from industrial waste heat. Clean Break reports:
Michaud has formed a company called AVEtec Energy, filed and obtained patents, and has partnered up with the University of Western Ontario's wind-tunnel lab to study small prototypes and do computer simulations of his 'vortex engine' process.Michaud calculates it would cost $60 million to build such a plant. But because it would be replacing the function of a cooling tower, that figure would be offset by up to $20 million. The end result, assuming it works and is safe, would be a 200 megawatt power station producing clean energy at less than half the cost of a coal plant.
Via: The Toronto Star and Clean Break
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I hate it when someone steals my Digg.
Didn't see that one coming. As long as there's no side effects (eg: noise/visual pollution), then this sounds pretty cool!
I'd hate to fly through that vortex!
There would have to be a no-fly zone around this type of power plant.
Another question that should be raised is: "with all that heat being released into the atmosphere, would it make better sense to use geothermal power, or create steam by coal-fired plants, which would negate the power benefits?"
Nuclear plant cooling towers seem to be the sensible place to start. After all, what better combination than a tornado adjacent a nuclear reactor?
Since a nuclear plant generates steam and then just dumps that heat into the environment anyway, you wouldn't be adding any heat.
And assuming that a tornado actually cools the air this could be a way to use more of the energy generated from whatever created the heat in the first place, i.e., increasing the energy efficiency.
CAN YOU HARNESS THE ENERGY OF LIGHTNING?
I once heard a scientist say that there was 1.21 gigawatts of electricity per bolt of lightning. And no, I'm not being silly, I'm just uninformed of any such technology or pursuits.
Adam, a Watt is a time dependent unit - Joules/second. It's true that there's a lot of Watts in lightning, but what really matters is the energy content in J or kWh. Because lightning is so short, the actual content is very small, and then still, because it's so much in such a short time, it's very hard to store reliably.
that was AWESOME!!!!
(local montabella students)(thats in Michigan)he he
eeewww
That tornado with lightning is one of the most popular pictures,
It's not having hurricanes around here in N.Y