Points of Interest | Green Energy News

December 7, 2003 – Vol.8 No.37

POINTS OF INTEREST.

A weekly collection of websites worth visiting.

Consider how a Grandfather Clock works and where it gets the energy to make it tick.

Inside the clock is a winch with a pulley on one end of its shaft and the gears of the clock mechanism on the other. Around the pulley is wrapped a chain. On the far end of that chain is a heavy weight, usually made of cast iron. To make the clock work a person using his or her strength turns the winch and brings the weight to the top - as high as it can go. As soon as the person stops cranking, the weight pulls on the chain slowly (very slowly) turning the pulley and through its connected shaft makes the clock tick.

So, the energy used to drive the clock comes from the person winding the crank, and the weight becomes the storage device for energy the person exerted in cranking the winch.

( It you want to extend the analysis a bit, the person’s energy comes from whatever he/ she ate in the last 24 hours or so. And that food was grown with solar energy, directly as veggie food or as feed for animals somewhere in the food chain. Thus the Grandfather Clock is solar powered!)

Anyway, inventor Mohammed Alkhamis has idea that weights or counterweights could be a good way to store energy from wind, solar or ocean energy sources. His counterweight system is more complex than the Grandfather clock model and uses holes in the ground to drop counterweights into. A counterweight mechanism to operate the system would probably be inexpensive and the expense of hole drilling is related to depth, material drilled through and whether the hole needs to be lined to prevent water penetration.

However, the world is filled with unused holes in its crust. Abandoned mine shafts and wells for instance could possibly be used.

Alkhamis has patented a version of the counterweight device as well as another on an energy device which uses buoyancy. Patents don’t guarantee the technological or economic success of an invention only that the idea is unique. Visit Alkhamis web pages and animations of his ideas at http://www.geocities.com/energy_is_free/