Using gravity as a renewable energy source?

theconditioner

theconditioner

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Nov 18, 2004
Physics majors enter, please. I've always wondered why we can't do this. May seem simple, but why can't we harness Earth's gravitationalfield to produce energy somehow?

Maybe someone can provide some explainations.
 
What comes down must go up.

It's renewable but you need some energy input to lift things so that gravity can pull them back down - and that's inefficient.
 
b/c it will take just as much kinetic energy to raise an object to a height where it can have gravitational potential energy
 
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Yea, I've thought that was the main reason (reaction/equal and opposite reaction), but idontknow still

What got me thinking about this was that I saw an article on how scientists are trying to harness ocean currents to produce energy. I've heard of thisbefore, and it seems like a good idea. I'm not sure it can provide us with a large amount of energy though.

What are some other energy alternatives / ideas you've had before? What is new in research?
 
What got me thinking about this was that I saw an article on how scientists are trying to harness ocean currents to produce energy. I've heard of this before, and it seems like a good idea. I'm not sure it can provide us with a large amount of energy though.


Yeah, that's the problem with those things - they don't produce much energy so you need miles and miles of them and even then you don't get muchpower.

It's the way forward though - and I'm sure in years to come they will be much more efficient.
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I just recently read an article about how they want to use floating windmills in the middle of the north Atlantic to harness the swift northern winds intoenergy. They said it would only take about 1200 windmills covering an area of only 400 square miles to power the entire country of Norway. 400 square milesin merely a spec in the North Atlantic so it seems feasible enough.
 
It's the way forward though - and I'm sure in years to come they will be much more efficient.


^ yea, hopefully.

But yea, dam's essentially use gravity, sort of..right?

Ah!

If I wasn't poor, i'd probably be a physics major. But this was making me think about the application of Newton's Laws of motion and energy here(and honestly, I have no clue what to think). Wikipedia article (yea, not reliable either):

Newton's laws were verified by experiment and observation for over 200 years, and they are excellent approximations at the scales and speeds of everyday life. Newton's laws of motion, together with his law of universal gravitation and the mathematical techniques of calculus, provided for the first time a unified quantitative explanation for a wide range of physical phenomena.

These three laws hold to a good approximation for macroscopic objects under everyday conditions. However, Newton's laws (combined with Universal Gravitation and Classical Electrodynamics) are inappropriate for use in certain circumstances, most notably at very small scales, very high speeds (in special relativity, the Lorentz factor must be included in the expression for momentum along with rest mass and velocity) or very strong gravitational fields. Therefore, the laws cannot be used to explain phenomena such as conduction of electricity in a semiconductor, optical properties of substances, errors in non-relativistically corrected GPS systems and superconductivity. Explanation of these phenomena requires more sophisticated physical theory, including General Relativity and Relativistic Quantum Mechanics.

According to the principle of relativity, there is no preferred frame of reference. The laws of physics are equally valid in all frames of reference. Motion can only be measured relative to a frame of reference. According to the equivalence principle, an observer on the surface of the Earth could not find any difference between the gravitational attraction of Earth and the inertial force that he feels when he is in a rocket in outer space that accelerates upwards (from the standpoint of the observer) at g. In other words, he may regard any inertial force as a gravitational force. Consequently, Newton's laws of motion are only valid in an inertial frame of reference. Notice that the surface of the Earth does not define an inertial frame of reference because it is rotating and orbiting and because of Earth's gravity. However, since the rotations and revolutions are relatively slow, the inertial force is tiny. Therefore, Newton's laws of motion remain a good approximation on Earth. In a non-inertial frame of reference, inertial forces must be considered for Newton's laws to remain valid.

In quantum mechanics concepts such as force, momentum, and position are defined by linear operators that operate on the quantum state; at speeds that are much lower than the speed of light, Newton's laws are just as exact for these operators as they are for classical objects. At speeds comparable to the speed of light, the second law holds in the original form , which says that the force is the derivative of the momentum of the object with respect to time, but some of the newer versions of the second law (such as the constant mass approximation above) do not hold at relativistic velocities.

I don't know. I wonder if we may have some type of breakthrough, given that Newton's laws apply in only some circumstances. Maybe withthe advancement of quantum physics. But honestly, I have no clue what's going on in the field. Just some thoughts.
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nuclear fusion anyone?

I was watching this thing on the discovery channel talking about how a bunch of russian and german scientist are trying to literally create a sun on earthand use a high powered magnetic chamber to avoid the sun from destroying anything. here is a vid on it.
 
um rivers flow because of gravity. dam's have turbines which turn from flow and create electricity.
 
you don't want to be a physics major.
Dang, so I should try to be a psychic like you? Interesting.

Nice vid, Anleu. I wonder, though, how big of a mess it would be if the fusion plant were destroyed, or if something were to go wrong. Kind of freaky.
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"Clean" coal and hundreds of small scale nuclear reactors are our future.

The money has already been invested...there is no turning back.
 
Originally Posted by theconditioner

you don't want to be a physics major.
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Dang, so I should try to be a psychic like you? Interesting.

Nice vid, Anleu. I wonder, though, how big of a mess it would be if the fusion plant were destroyed, or if something were to go wrong. Kind of freaky.

Big but I'm assuming that is why they would put them in remote locations. Also they have some sort of fail safe button to turn off the fusion instantlysince it burns up so fast, but the downside is all the harmful waste it produces.
Big but I'm assuming that is why they would put them in remote locations. Also they have some sort of fail safe button to turn off the fusion instantly since it burns up so fast, but the downside is all the harmful waste it produces.
I'm not positive but I think it was radioactive. I mean they claim it is environmentally friendly yet most scientist agree that we are stillyears away from that.
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Big but I'm assuming that is why they would put them in remote locations. Also they have some sort of fail safe button to turn off the fusion instantly since it burns up so fast, but the downside is all the harmful waste it produces.

Dang, didn't catch that in the vid. I thought it said that the "waste" was harmless? I more than likely wansn't payingattention too well. What type of waste does it produce?
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"Clean" coal and hundreds of small scale nuclear reactors are our future.

The money has already been invested...there is no turning back.
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Yea, for some reason, i've heard this somewhere. Have any sources? I'm interested in learning more.
 
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