Very interesting piece on the inventor Louis Michaud, whose current brainwave is to use tornadoes to generate power.
Michaud has spent the past 40 years studying tornados and hurricanes, and is convinced it’s possible to engineer and control powerful, full-scale whirlwinds and harness their energy to produce emission-free electricity.
Forget wind farms and their intermittent operation: the future of electricity generation could be tornado power on demand.
Michaud has adapted this process to create what he calls a vortex engine, and has patented the invention in both Canada and the United States. Recently, he formed a company called AVEtec Energy Corp. with an aim to turning this unconventional – and to many, unthinkable – approach to electricity generation into a commercial reality.
His challenge now is to persuade venture capitalists, energy executives and at least one community to back the construction of a full-scale vortex engine, capable of producing a power-packed funnel cloud that stretches kilometres into the atmosphere and runs on waste heat, ideally from a power plant.
“I’m talking about a 200-megawatt device, which would be 200 metres in diameter,” says Michaud. That’s enough electricity for 200,000 homes.
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This almost sounds too dangerous. Maybe nuclear reactors were thought of same way when they were first proposed!
Sounds Interesting 🙂