Can you imagine a world where it cost nothing to have electricity? Tesla did, and he died penniless and alone. Why did the world allow that to happen?
Have you ever heard of Free Energy? Have you ever even considered something as ever-present as power being free? If we even had the concept of that word, we would never need to have the discussion about why tungsten and halogen must go, being replaced by LED and CFL. It just wouldn’t matter.
It’s a concept that does not consider the profit margins of the Big Energy producers – oil, coal, and natural gas, but it could completely change our world. The idea of free energy could also completely change the stakes of the petro-dollar game we play every time we put on a show somewhere that has lighting – can you picture every device you put out there on a show having a locally placed free energy source that powers it instead of running multicables everywhere to provide electricity? My imagination gives me pictures of little hard drive sized power generators that can be unloaded from a roadcase, added to a truss, and energized without the need for feeder cable, mults, long patch cables, and the like. We are already as an industry getting behind the idea of wireless DMX and transmitting a DMX network across the airwaves. Look up LumenRadio‘s work, it will blow your mind – and I mean really blow your mind.
Maybe more importantly… can you imagine our world without the need to fight over energy? Look at every war that has taken place over the last 100 years – every single one can been tied to fighting over resources, even if the tie that binds is hidden and disguised as policy. Our world needs something to give, to break loose – and I think that free energy is the thing that can change our world. What would the world do if there was no need for the hundreds of defense contractor companies that get worldwide money defending the one thing that we always see the need to blow people up over? Can you imagine such a world where we could spend more money on something as comparatively mundane as Entertainment Lighting in order to give the world the kinds of mind-blowing productions that we could with the kinds of technologies used in warfare?
Obviously I’m just postulating. But also postulating are the ideas behind free energy and devices that would potentially (get it?) be able to make some free energy. I cannot let go of the thought of a color scroller sized power distribution unit that can power several fixtures, or dimmers, or anything that can save money on power by being free. In my lifetime, I want to make this happen.
I love to spread ideas around our industry like free energy, because we work and live in a very creative industry absolutely full of people who can make stuff like this happen. We are the industry that has invented wireless data, innovative power and signal distribution systems like the Series 400 stuff from PRG, we’ve improved the jacketing and conductive materials inside of our power distribution systems to work with the power that we get from the power companies, and we’ve invented devices to clean that power up and make it steady, stable, and usable for some of the sensitive equipment we use for our work. I do worry that some of the people in our business are too centered around how much money that can be made from their technologies that they alienate the entire industry to a small knit group of providers that can afford the costs to harness such things like free energy. Hopefully some of the more productive generators of free energy will put some free instructions and information out on the web for all of us to try, build, and improve upon for the good of all humans on Earth.
Readers, there are some terms that need to be researched on your part in order to understand some of the intricate details of terms like perpetual motion, zero-point energy, and overunity. These aren’t difficult concepts and you don’t have to have a PhD in Physics and Electromagnetism to understand these terms. Let’s start easy:
What is PERPETUAL MOTION, and how does it relate to our world of Light?
This, good people of Earth, is perpetual motion:
When talking about things that make electricity and energy, we have to look at what exactly happens to make energy. It’s a simple thing – we use some form of simple fuel (like coal, gas, or oil) to turn a magnet inside of a closed-loop of copper wire, or a conductor. As the magnet spins (albeit very fast), an electromagnetic field is produced from the spinning magnet’s kinetic energy into electricity. Or, just as useful and still used today, some kind of closed loop of wire spinning between the poles of two magnets. We can thank Mr. Faraday for this, but everyone has postulated on it in some form or another.
Perpetual motion is, on a whole, the idea of having some kind of electrical energy creation device that will spin on its own, requiring no energy to keep its spin and continuation of power generation. Remember the Law of Conservation of Energy from high school? It states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change from one form to another. Because of this law of physics, called the 1st law of thermodynamics, the idea of a system of perpetual motion is completely irrelevant, or at least that is what science is debating right now, and has been for decades. What we’re talking about here is being able to create energy – which goes against the principle of the Law of Conservation of Energy – and to create that energy without having any input to that creation cycle. This means perpetual motion, or something moving forever on its own, is to generate electricity from the electromagnetic field from which it is derived without adding any energy to get energy. If that isn’t clear enough, imagine your local power utility being able to use no coal, gas, or oil to make electricity but still being able to charge you whatever they want to use their power.
Let me say that one different way: If you can figure out how to create a machine that creates energy without using any energy, you can power whatever you want, for free, forever. Forever in petro-dollar terms is a long time, folks. Can you imagine being able to live through the winter with all of the heat and electricity you want without the huge bills? If the power companies patent this technology before its able to be utilized on a free, worldwide scale, we’ll at least have a lower or nonexistent use of oil, coal, and gas for power, but we’ll be paying them for pretty much nothing. Also, we’ll be paying them forever.
Look at it another way, more directed towards the Entertainment Industry – can you imagine being able to power your show and have no bill? The last show I designed had a combined wattage of 240,000W, which if we put to costs comes out somewhere in the neighborhood of 960kWh for 4 hours of power, or if you assume a commercial rate of $0.10 per kWh comes to about $100 bucks per 4 hours of the show, if it all were blasting at full at once, of course. But if we take that 100 bucks a night and multiply by a week’s worth of shows, we’ve got $700 bucks for the week – and $2800 for the month. See the costs adding up?
Now what if you could save that $2800 bucks for a month of electricity for shows and put it back into the production by having free sources of electricity? This is why perpetual motion is important, and should be to you, especially if you’re in Light. If we can solve the issues of a perpetually generating device, we could make them as large or as small as we need for any application. In Entertainment, this would literally redefine our game.
What is OVERUNITY, and how does it relate to our world of Light?
Overunity is a very interesting concept that is often confused for being something that it is not: Overunity is NOT a measurement of the efficiency of a system that generates power, it is simply the coefficient of performance (COP) that is derived from how much energy the person operating that specific generator. The efficiency of a system like a power generator takes into consideration all of the energy put into that system to make it run, like electricity from the grid, environmental energy like wind or water. A windmill, for example, doesn’t matter how efficient the system is, because there is plenty of energy to be transferred (you know, the wind?) to make the system run. When we’re talking about overunity with respect to free power, we’re talking about the amount of energy needed to get it moving and keep it moving.
Efficiency is the ability for a system or something that makes power to do so based on the energy you put into it; the Coefficient of Performance is how effectively the energy used in the goal of what the system is doing, in this case, making electricity. The Coefficient of Performance is how well the system uses the energy you put into it! So if your system can be started up with no input from you, the COP is obviously greater than 1 – if you have a small battery of something of the sort that you use to energize the system, but the system then can lose the battery and run on its own, you have a device producing more energy you’re putting in, or overunity. For example – with no conductors, no power sources, and no trickery, the person in this video below flings two magnets at each other while the magnetic fields around them propel them into a cyclic motion. Watch this:
Is it a perfect explanation? No, but without going into the depths of thermodynamics, it’ll have to do for now. More on this subject later, I have a huge amount of interest in this topic – enough to make me want to redo some Calculus classes I should have paid a bit more attention in when I was younger…
Interested in reading DA Kelly’s Manual of Free Energy Devices and Systems? You definitely should, since it’s free!
