Ten Things the Future will hold! (8)

8. Future Energy

Today I'm going to write about ways in which energy could be produced in future.

1. Space Energy:

Space Energy plants could be used in the future and would be a real innovation in the production of energy. Companies out there are already planning to supply people with energy produced in space as early as 2016. Orbiting solar cell plants can generate power, transmit it back to earth as microwaves where it can be converted to electricity.

Orbiting Solar Panels

Almost like oil rigs in space with out the need of oil these power plants would be in space with no worry of emissions of any kind damaging the atmosphere.
Another concept of this is giant mirrors in space which could bounce back concentrated sunlight to earth where it could be picked up by a solar farm, however if a mis-hap occurred this could turn into a giant solar death ray ...

Thorium

2. Thorium Power:

Thorium is an element which is slightly radioactive however far more abundant than elements used in power plants like Uranium, this means with the right technology to harness thorium's radioactivity at an optimum level these power plants could become more common. This way of producing nuclear power is also far safer.
Estimates for Thorium Power are five years away.

Thorium

3. Nuclear Fusion:

Nuclear Fusion is the process of the nuclei of two atoms fusing together to form a heavier atom. This process releases huge amounts of energy and an example of this can be found in ... oh maybe our sun? Yes, stars 'run' on converting atoms (in the case of the sun) from hydrogen to helium but even bigger stars can fuse more complex elements. If we ever harnessed this type of technology we would be able to produce incomparable amounts of energy but this process would be expensive. Estimates for Nuclear Fusion power plants are 2050.

 

4. Perpetual Motion:

Perpetual Motion is the study of machines which could produce free energy, basically energy from nothing. However most of these machines are hoaxes, fakes or just do not work - the idea of perpetual motion defies the first and second laws of thermodynamics. So unless their is a way to bypass these by introducing an original source of power the device generally does not count as free energy/perpetual motion.
So unfortunately the estimated date for these devices is never. Unless of course our technology becomes refined enough were we could possibly make a device like this but not in the near future.

Thanks for reading, Chris.

One concept showing the
an imaginary perpetual motion device.
The water continues to pour and re-pour etc.