Would you live in a house powered by tornadoes?
If you want good sustainable energy for your home, forget solar or wind energy—that is, plain old blowing wind energy. Instead, beat those utility bills into oblivion with your very own environmentally friendly twister!
You’re probably saying, “ok, how does this work exactly?” Here’s how:
Hot air rises, while cold air drops. Heat makes most things lighter. You can see this effect when water boils into steam and steam condenses on the ceiling of your bathroom/kitchen and comes down in little droplets, or in a lava lamp when the balls of wax go up from the light at the bottom and then come down once they cool off.
This is how tornadoes [and other windy weather phenomena like hurricanes] work. Generally, hot air rises above cool air. But under certain circumstances, an upper-level mass of cooler air finds itself on top of warmer air, and it struggles to get down. One of the ways it does this is by poking a hole through and then descending rapidly, producing the same effect you see when water goes down a drain—a sort of vortex.
As we all know, nature’s vortices (yes, this is the plural form of “vortex”) can be quite powerful. Tornadoes’ winds can exceed 300 mph (480 km/h). That would be a pretty nice source of wind energy.
The easy part is accomplished with a source of heat. it could be geothermal heat from inside the Earth or leftover heat from a power plant—it could simply be piped into the bottom of the vortex, where it would naturally rise.
The key thing, of course, would be to make sure the tornado does not get out of control. It would have to be contained. Furthermore, there would have to be a reliable source of cold at the top of the vortex. Then you’d have to design some kind of turbine or spinning windmill that could withstand the extreme forces of this reaction and harness its power.
There is a nice article about this concept on the Ecogeek blog. And if you are into other funky weird ways that renewable energy can be used, there are a few here.
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