New Energy News (December 2001)
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | New Energy News (December 2001) |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Patrick G Bailey |
| Keywords | New Energy, Cold Fusion, Zero Point Energy, renewable energy policy, Charge Clusters |
| Published | 2001 |
| Journal | New Energy News |
| Volume | 8 |
| Number | 12 |
| No. of pages | 21 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
Overview
This is the December 2001 issue of New Energy News (Volume 8, Number 12, ISSN 1075-0045), the monthly newsletter of the Institute for New Energy (INE), edited by Patrick G Bailey and distributed by email in plain ASCII and PDF form. It is not a research paper but a news bulletin: a compilation of edited items, forwarded articles, correspondence and editorial comment gathered by Bailey, Hal Fox and Tom Valone. INE was then based at 3084 E. 3300 South, Salt Lake City, with annual membership at $35 including the newsletter, or $150 including four quarterly issues of the Journal of New Energy.
The issue's centre of gravity is the relationship between conventional energy policy and the "new-energy" field. Roughly half the pages are given over to a detailed digest of a U.S. Senate bill and a DARPA propulsion solicitation, the rest to short news items, a substantial book review, letters and meeting announcements. The editorial position running through the issue is explicit and repeated: that the commercialization of new-energy devices — cold fusion, zero point energy extraction, charge-cluster technology — would relieve strategic dependence on imported oil, reduce pollution, and improve economic conditions worldwide. That framing departs from the mainstream energy-policy literature of the period, which treated the renewable/efficiency portfolio as the whole of the alternative-energy question and did not admit the anomalous-energy claims as candidates at all.
Contents of the issue
INE website and housekeeping
Bailey opens with a note that the INE website (established 27 January 1996) is to be upgraded. The site had deliberately been kept as almost pure text with no frames, on the rule that "it always works for anyone" anywhere in the world with any browser. The proposed redesign is a small main page of topical links pointing to intermediate topic pages. Pictures are to remain discouraged on the ground that "one color picture can take up as much room as the entire INE Database text". New site features listed include the abstracts and some papers from the October INE/EEMF Conference and an updated INE Device Database behind a password.
Senate Bill S.1333, 107th Congress
The longest single item is a clause-by-clause recap of the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Investment Act of 2001, introduced 8 August 2001 and sponsored by Senators Jeffords, Lieberman, Snowe, Schumer and Kerry. The digest covers:
- Findings — that dependence on foreign fossil fuels is "contrary to our national security", that alternative sustainable sources must be pursued, and that net metering of small self-generation systems is in the public interest.
- National Electric System Benefits Fund — funded by a "wires charge" of 2 mills per kilowatt-hour on all electricity generated in or serving the United States for interstate commerce, administered by an eight-person Benefits Board, and used to match state programs for renewables, low-income energy assistance, conservation and R&D at up to 50 percent.
- Renewable generation standards — a minimum renewable fraction for retail suppliers, phased from 2.5 percent in 2002 to 20 percent in 2020.
- Renewable Energy Credits — one credit per renewable kilowatt-hour, tradeable between suppliers, with the market ultimately setting their value; failure to submit the required credits attracts a civil penalty of up to three times the estimated national average market value of the shortfall.
- Net metering — mandatory for customer generators under 100 kW using a renewable source, at rates identical to other customers in the same class and with no additional standby, capacity or interconnection charge.
The newsletter's editorial comment calls the bill "a very positive direction" but singles out one provision for criticism: unused kilowatt-hour credits accumulated during the previous calendar year expire without compensation, which the editor bracket-annotates as meaning "a customer-generator is not encouraged to produce more energy than they consume — an unfortunate provision of this bill that will tend to slow national renewable energy production capacity". Readers are urged to contact their senators, and the full membership of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and its Energy Subcommittee is reprinted with contact details.
News items
Short pieces, each credited to the submitter, include: a request for information on three inventors said to be most discussed among Silicon Valley businessmen — "Spence, the Pantone engine, and the Carrick process"; UPS field-testing a diesel-electric hybrid delivery truck in Huntsville, Alabama; a note that California "uses over half of all its energy to pump water", with Bailey asking whether Tom Valone's conference demonstration of a ramp device that rolled metal balls up a 10-degree incline could be adapted to lift water; an excerpt on the USA Patriot Act's "sneak and peak" search provisions; the stalling of the 2001 Senate energy bill; a report on "smart" self-healing metals and NASA Langley's Morphing Project; the Dutch Nuna winning the World Solar Challenge; and Paul Stamets' mycoremediation work with Pacific Northwest National Labs, in which mushroom beds nearly eliminated a coliform count.
Hal Fox contributes several policy items keyed to Wall Street Journal reports — Saudi oil supply and terrorism financing, the Kyoto treaty proceeding without the United States, pollution of the world's lakes, and an Index of Economic Freedom — each closing with the same editorial refrain that new-energy commercialization would improve the situation. He cites his own estimate, with S-X Jin, that penetrating ten percent of the $4.5 trillion per year fossil fuel market would take about ten years and over $400 billion in plant and equipment.
Wiegand wires and the DARPA solicitation
Tom Valone contributes an excerpt from a Thomas Bearden USPA presentation on the Wiegand effect: a magnetic pulse wire that, in a field of a certain size, self-reverses its dual magnetic state and delivers a sharp magnetic pulse, so that a surrounding fine-turn coil yields "a 12-volt pulse of electrical energy, for free". A long reference list of 1970s and 1980s engineering literature on the effect is appended. Valone also reprints in full the Proposer Information Pamphlet for DARPA BAA 99-22, Small Scale and Novel Propulsion Systems Studies and Development for Small Aerospace Vehicles, covering Topic A (miniaturized propulsion for hovering vehicles, long-range cruise vehicles and small rockets delivering 0.3–0.5 kg to low Earth orbit) and Topic B (novel high-density spacecraft power, energy storage and propulsion). His covering remark is a caution rather than an endorsement: "The only problem is that anything we describe in detail and propose to build will be used to make bombs, as indicated below." Two Nature items from the 15 November 2001 issue on materials for clean energy and alternative energy technologies close the articles section.
Book review
Hal Fox reviews Dohn Riley and Mark McLaughlin, Turning the Corner: Energy Solutions For the 21st Century (Alternative Energy Institute, 2001, 385 pp., $24.95), which he judges "the best yet published" on fossil fuel use and alternative energy. He praises the first 173 pages on fossil fuels and conventional alternatives, and particularly commends the authors for stating honestly that hydrogen fuel cells consume a great deal of energy in making the hydrogen and are well short of 100 percent efficient. He then supplies seven corrections to the book's account of cold fusion: that the press conference was called by the University of Utah administration and not by Pons and Fleischmann; that John Bockris replicated the result in under six weeks; that several DOE national laboratories replicated the effect; that over 600 papers from over 200 laboratories in 30 countries report replication or extension; that many patents have issued abroad (over 200 in Japan) while U.S. applications mentioning cold fusion are denied; that the MIT experiment signed by sixteen PhDs, none experienced electrochemists, "actually got excess heat" and that one or more authors "changed the data to show negative results"; and that there was a well-funded effort by hot-fusion supporters to destroy cold fusion in the United States. Fox's own summary is notably guarded: cold fusion "works; is difficult to replicate repeatedly; is highly dependent on the methods used to process the palladium cathodes; and has not yet been shown to have high commercial source of energy."
On zero point energy he faults the book for citing Ken Shoulders and Mesyats of Russia but not Stan Gleeson of Cincinnati or Alexander Ilyanok, arguing that independent discovery by four groups in three countries strengthens the case, and states his belief that the discovery of high-density electron charge clusters (HDCC) "is the most important new-energy discovery of the 20th Century". He also notes Randell Mills' collapsed-hydrogen work and commends the authors for not reporting the many claims about magnetic rotating machines, "as none of these rotating machines have shown strong commercial potential".
Letters and closing
David Rosignoli forwards a Poptronics description of carbon-electrode ultracapacitors said to have "100 times the energy of conventional capacitors and 10 times the power of ordinary batteries", cycling hundreds of thousands of times, with a 2700 farad Maxwell Technologies unit delivering 625 A at 2.7 V at one third the weight and half the volume of an equivalent battery pack. Michael McDonnough writes about a betavoltaic power system claimed at roughly six times the energy density of Paul Brown's tritium-based system. Bailey closes with a seasonal message placing "money and greed... pretty far down on my priority list — way after health, family, friends, and religious beliefs."
Assessment
As a document the issue is valuable chiefly as a primary source. It preserves, in one place, what a working new-energy organisation in late 2001 thought was worth its members' attention, and the mix is instructive: mainstream legislative detail and DARPA procurement text sit beside Wiegand-effect free-pulse claims and charge-cluster advocacy, with no editorial partition between them. The policy digest is genuinely useful and accurately transcribed; the S.1333 recap is specific about mills per kilowatt-hour, phase-in percentages and penalty multiples, and the one criticism it offers — that expiring net-metering credits remove the incentive to over-produce — is a real design flaw in that class of legislation and was later addressed in some state programs.
The weaknesses are those of a newsletter that reprints without adjudicating. The Wiegand item is the clearest case: the Wiegand effect is a real and well-documented magnetic phenomenon, but the excerpt's gloss that the coil yields "a 12-volt pulse of electrical energy, for free" elides the mechanical or field energy that drives the domain reversal, and the newsletter carries the claim forward without comment. Similarly, Fox's cold-fusion corrections mix items that are documented (the scale of the replication literature, the U.S. patent-office posture) with a serious allegation of data falsification at MIT that is asserted rather than sourced; the reader is given a reference for the book but none for the accusation. The declaration that high-density charge clusters are "the most important new-energy discovery of the 20th Century" is offered as a personal judgment and is not supported anywhere in the issue by measurement.
There is also a tension the issue does not resolve. Fox's own honest summary of cold fusion — difficult to replicate, cathode-preparation dependent, not yet shown to be a commercial energy source — sits a few pages from repeated editorial assertions that new-energy commercialization will stabilize oil prices, clean polluted lakes and improve economic freedom. The second set of claims presupposes exactly the reliability the first set concedes is absent. Taken on its own terms, the issue is honest about that gap when it is being technical and forgets it when it is being political.