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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (903372)	11/26/2015 1:45:17 PM
From: Metacomet	Respond to of 1574518

...mostly you are looking to time shift..like your DVR

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (903372)	11/26/2015 1:58:50 PM
From: bentway	Respond to of 1574518

I found this article - it doesn't exactly describe your situation: homepower.com ( If you can take the energy loss, it's still a way to store energy. ) Myth 1: Closed-Loop / Pumped Storage By far, the most common flawed design that we hear about at Home Power is the closed-loop system—that is, some scheme to pump water for the hydro turbine, and then have the turbine produce the electrical power for the pump…ad infinitum. Some of these schemes are simple “hydro-in-a-bucket” designs where the pump is expected to pressurize the water for the hydro turbine. Others are more involved, planning to pump water uphill to a pond or tank, and then let gravity do the job of running the turbine. All the while, the designer is expecting to get extra usable electric power from the turbine’s output—beyond what the pump is using. Whether large or small, all of these designs suffer from the same flaw in thinking. The first law of thermodynamics says that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. All of the energy systems (renewable and otherwise) that we rely upon convert existing energy into a form that we can use to do the work we want to do. In a hydro-electric system, the energy of moving water is transferred to a rotating shaft, converted to changing magnetic fields, and then converted to moving electrons (electricity). But at no point is energy created. If we use that energy to create magnetic fields again, spinning a shaft and pumping water up to a tank on a hill, we still haven’t created any energy. We’ve just changed its form again. In a perfect universe, perhaps it could be argued that such a pump and turbine arrangement could run perpetually. But it wouldn’t do us any good, because we want to use that electricity to do some work besides just running the pump. Using any electricity for other tasks would be robbing the pump of the power it needed to keep up with the turbine, and the loop’s interdependence would break down. That, and the fact that there are always other forces robbing energy from the system, means that such a loop wouldn’t run for long, and that noadditional energy could be extracted from it. Those additional energy-robbing forces, mostly friction, are the imperfections that cripple this closed-loop design. Every component of such a system has an operating efficiency of less than 100%. That means each conversion step in the process wastes some of the potential energy that the system started with. We know that energy is not being destroyed, but it is being allowed to escape the loop in the form of heat, vibration, and even noise. It is being converted into a form that we can’t readily use, or even recover. Let’s look at some typical microhydro system efficiency numbers: Penstock (pipeline) efficiency = 95%Nozzle and runner efficiency = 80%Permanent-magnet alternator efficiency = 90%Wiring and control efficiency = 98% 0.95 × 0.80 × 0.90 × 0.98 = 0.67 By the time the water has moved through this example microhydro generator system, only 67% of its initial potential energy has been converted to electricity. In fact, this would be considered very good performance—typical systems are about 55% efficient. Now let’s consider the efficiencies of pumping that water back to the hydro intake for reuse: Pipe efficiency = 95%Pump (motor and impeller) efficiency = 65% 0.95 × 0.65 × 0.67 (from above) = 0.41 By the time the water had gone all the way through the system, only 41% of it would be returned to the top of the intake. After a second loop around, only 17% (0.41 × 0.41) of the water would be left. If there isn’t a water supply with useful head and flow to start with, nothing will happen—the pump won’t run because it won’t have electricity; the hydro turbine won’t have electricity because the pump isn’t running. Adding water (or electricity) to “prime” the loop will make the loop operate only as long as the priming continues. This is where creative folks start asking questions about bigger water tanks; larger pipes with less friction loss; tanks on a tower for shorter pipe runs; more head, and less flow; less head and more flow; adding batteries (only 80% efficient themselves); or even just piping right from the pump to the turbine—anything to improve system efficiency. In fact, the simplest thing that could be done to get rid of inefficiencies would be to skip the water components altogether; just hook the shaft of a motor directly to the shaft of the alternator, and the alternators output wires directly to the motor (somehow, the fallacy in that thinking is easier for us to understand). But no matter the variables, the outcome will be the same—total efficiency will be less than 100% and no energy will be gained. Moving energy around and changing its form, like from chemical to mechanical to electrical, is only a way to lose some of it. These efficiency losses are part of the price we pay to get energy into a format that we can use. We can lose more, or we can lose less, but adding complexity is inefficiency and will never result in a net gain.