Theoretical New Technology for Energy Generation

I've been working on a new way to generate electricity, as a hobby and thought-experiment, for about half of my life (19ish years). I've come across some rocky lessons, but I thought I'd record what I learned and what the result was.

The problem is more important than any idea: 

I get excited about new technology. I totally buy into the hype at first. Going to an engineering college, the professors encouraged youthful minds to be skeptical. Useful thoughts stay between reasonable hope and reasonable skepticism. As long as you have a reason, right? The lack of a reason might be the best way to define the starting boundary of toxic positivity (giddy hype) and toxic negativity (ridicule, stigma).

With rising electricity prices, I found that EIA(Energy Information Administration) has useful pre-built graphs to help explain the situation: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/

There are plenty of takeaways from those graphs, but I was surprised to note how much coal power production decreased almost lock-step with natural gas production increases, during the 2010s.

I had an idea for a new way to draw energy from a gravitational field. But I should have focused on defining the problem better. After many years, I settled on a new problem statement: "If there was something simple, that was missed, about how gravity and a planetary surface interact, in a way that could generate electricity, what would it look like?"

Why did others and I fail before:

I get excited about my first solution, but the first version was not useful in itself. I was in high school, had already taken a thermodynamics section in Science class, and I still fell for a common mistake: I was trying to create perpetual motion device. I had thought if a magnet was moving  down through the center of a copper coil, where the magnet would charge the coil going down. Then use that energy to power an electromagnet, to shoot the magnet back up through the coil (while simultaneously disconnecting copper coil's circuit), and restart the cycle.

To my shame, it took some weeks to months before I realized, gravitational potential energy is conserved.

The first design was never going to work. The current that you get from the coil is too weak to charge the next circuit. The electromagnet would never be strong enough to shoot the magnet back up. I even did a brief test in college, to confirm my suspicion. I settled on taking Physics II (pausing the hobby). The class was difficult but had a lot of electromagnet and field math associated with it. The coil and the later electromagnet are both inductors that specifically *resist* a change in current. A related issue is challenging nuclear fusion, where they have to power the electromagnets with huge amounts of energy, when first using the chamber, to overcome impedance.

Almost every year, the USPTO, an equivalent Chinese agency, and interestingly Turkey, receive hopeful applications from inventors who claim to have created perpetual motion machines. The patent examiners even have classifications now, for all the different types. And the application goes into the public record, but is rarely awarded (except in Turkey where such things appear to be allowed).

Since the 1860s, where mechanical pump and valve technology revolutionized many other industries, applicants to the USPTO have been diligent about finding such a device. It is a huge reason why the laws of thermodynamics are so earnestly taught. And almost every inventor comes up with a new name for similar devices. You will see "gravity engine", "buoy engine", vague discussions of hydrostatic pressure, alternating counterweights with spinning crankshafts, and never ever a fully functional prototype. It is hard to make a powerplant, to begin with, or get buy-in from a group of people who are trained to be skeptical. And some of that skepticism causes a self-fulfilling prediction. But it is important to be wary of any claims of perpetual motion.

Still, various inventors have kept at it. The prior art is dense with these ideas. It is very difficult to:

     1) Use gravity against gravity

     2) Create enough velocity or pressure in a circulating liquid to produce enough electricity to pay off the cost of generator (let alone all construction and maintenance costs)

     3) Where the device also resets itself back to starting conditions (i.e. all liquid is back to starting levels at all locations)

     4) Output more electrical energy than is input into the system

But I think I finally figured out a way to do it. In an exploratory math type of way. Again, no fully functional prototype. Again, with a name I made up.

The existing and future competitors:

Solar is fantastic, at noon on a sunny day. It needs batteries or some type of energy storage for other use at peak hours of the day, but it has been a huge win for civilization. It's also very affordable, in 2025, and already has wide-spread adoption.

But it is intermittent power. It can generate too much power around noon and threaten the grid without smart shutoffs or batteries (See France and German fines, Australia proposed law that was shot down, and California's need to sell cheap electricity to other states.) Many solar panels also appear to be made by slaves, in a particular country, but you didn't hear that from me. It would explain the steady decrease in the cost of production. And indicate a long-term lack of stability in the lowered price.

Wind is fantastic, but there are buts here, too. We have to build up where it is windy more consistently. It also needs batteries in order to be useful to the grid in the long-term peak power situations. Simpler supply chains than solar. And like solar, the designs have helped a lot of land-owners have another source of income.

The Texas 2021 freeze saw wind power shut down to roughly the same extent as natural gas power plants: https://practical.engineering/blog/2021/3/22/what-really-happened-during-the-texas-power-grid-outage

Bats and birds are affected, along with people's view of the countryside. But we aren't supposed to talk about it.

Natural gas is not natural, but it has probably single-handedly helped keep electricity prices low for the United States during the 2010s. And that's not a marketing gimmick. As wind and solar power rose in production, I believe natural gas generated power more than doubled their output rates during that time. The tech is excellent at load-following power generation, and those gas pipelines can be viewed as big batteries. Don't believe me? Look at what happened to US electricity prices after the start of the Ukraine war. Domestic electricity prices are related to global demand for liquefied natural gas. That's how dependent the US still is on the stuff.

The carbon dioxide byproduct and the unburnt methane at each stage of the process could be major contributors to greenhouse gases. Methane being a huge danger, by volume, compared to carbon dioxide.

Hydro-power had its day. It provided power like natural-gas in terms of the combined solution of load-following and energy storage. Roughly 3% of US dams are wired with generators. 

However, some groups are skeptical about the amount of methane production due to the lakes that form behind the dams. The dams are not aging well, very expensive to repair. And as temperatures rise, there will be decreased availability of fresh water. Which explains why the lake levels are lowering at Lake Mead: https://www.newsweek.com/how-lake-mead-water-levels-compare-critically-low-1973055 Switzerland pivoted in the early 2020s from hydro development and transitioned to solar for a lot of projects, partially due to concerns about rainfall patterns affecting grid security.

Nuclear had its day, and maybe another one, too. It has helped France receive consistent power for many decades and helped some US areas, too. I know a lot of people are pushing new nuclear fission plants, in 2025, but I don't think many realize how long the plants take to build. These are decade long projects. They can be built and operated safely, but it will be expensive to do so. Nuclear engineers take a long time to train, and even then, when something rarely goes wrong in a complex system, it can be very difficult to repair. Look at Japan's lengthy clean up efforts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident If this was your investment, would you have the patience for it or the willingness to take on the liability?

I see the continued use of nuclear fission reactors in NASA probes. The energy density in volume and mass terms is too fantastic for them to ever abandon the technology, until something better comes along. It also makes sense for bunkers, where space is incredibly limited.

A future nuclear fusion reactor may be a competitor, but we have yet to see a publicly announced version of a fully functional prototype. CEOs of such companies keep talking about milestones and record-breaking experiments, but will they be able to deliver on their timelines of a few years? We'll see. But for what it is worth, the announcement of ignition: https://www.llnl.gov/article/49306/lawrence-livermore-national-laboratory-achieves-fusion-ignition had bogus math to it. 2 MW in, 3 MW out. If you only count the lasers (as the energy input), and you only measure the output (not capture the energy for electricity generation). This is a 100 MW facility running a number of other experiments, but it wasn't the type of progress one would normally expect after so many years of research and so much funding already put into it. I think nuclear fusion research should continue, but the scale of the funding (in 2023, $1 billion USD went into nuclear fusion research, according to FIA) is getting outrageous for no fully functional prototype.

I think all of these power sources should be used to a certain extent, in the present, but none of them are the type of complete solution that humanity needs. It may be impossible to get everything right for a given method of electricity generation. That's why a combination of different methods are so heavily stressed.

So what is a data center to do?

Data centers, and the tech giants behind them, need scalable and reliable power. It is not just business continuity management, it is a fear of future regulation. If a local government or regulator had to choose between powering part of the grid near a hospital, the block that allows me to watch a YouTube video at home at 6pm, or powering the grid near a datacenter, which one would be left on? The hospital, I got no chance.

Like cryptocurrency miners, data centers are reasonably afraid of being regulated out of large, discretionary access to grid power. There are ten of millions sometimes hundreds of millions of USD invested into data center campuses. This context explains why so many are interested in the Texas power grid, compared to the two other grids in the US.

So they want to generate as much power on-site as possible. The timeline to two-three years to build a data center matches well with the timeline to build out solar and battery setups. But the hunger for power remains. I expect some of the first effective and enforced legislation related to sentient beings that do not require hospitals. 

Geothermal has approximately a 50/50 drill success rate, and it is too site specific to be a generic solution.

Tech giants can easily throw around millions of dollars into nuclear fusion projects, because they want a more energy-dense solution than solar panels, as the cost of everything rises. I fully expect a major pump-hydro energy storage facility in the US Rocky Mountains or the mesa's of the southwest US. With the east-facing bottom side of the elevation has a data center, and the liquid is raised into some mountain dip or valley. Covering the upper and lower reservoir with solar panels, to avoid evaporation. That would be a beautiful sight to behold.

But humanity can't (and sometimes shouldn't) behave in all the ways a tech giant can. It's old legs aren't as flexible in the short run.

New Problems require New Solutions

Compounding inflation is hitting industries at different rates. The cost of bridges alone is another post. But I am surprised that US electricity prices have not risen more than they already have. The price of electricity doesn't matter too much to wealthy companies or individuals. But low income families and tight-margin companies can be severely affected by electricity price surges. The vulnerable parts of our civilization need affordable electricity. I argue the price of electricity should be considered a strong measure of the success of a civilization.

The utility companies have to replace more expensive (and better built and safer) power lines after more severe storms. It doesn't seem like a long-term plan. We need to minimize the distribution of large amounts of power over long distances. And underground power cables are way too expensive for the average city or town.

The primary solution is to generate as much power on-site or nearby, as possible. In as many different ways. Only use large transmission lines as a back-up or load-balancing solution, not as the primary method of power delivery. So humanity will now and in the future desire a generic, local power solution for its communities.

Moreover, almost all mentioned methods of electricity generation require some level of atmospheric exposure. In the rare event of a serious CME or magnetic pole reversal (NASA implies not soon: https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/earth-science/flip-flop-why-variations-in-earths-magnetic-field-arent-causing-todays-climate-change/), we would have to rebuild our grid, possibly in an entirely different way. Powerplants would need radiation shielding of a kind we may not be willing or able to pay at that stage. I think we need to generate some percentage of power underground for large populations. This could significantly help any civilization rebuild itself during a catastrophe. At the same time, we need simple solutions that have simple supply chains.

So here's my math about a new theoretical method of energy generation:

https://github.com/zahavens/graviticengine

In theory, it doesn't require a conventional fuel source. Speculation about the source of the electricity is included in the work notes. I am going 'open science'-ish at this stage, to help see if anyone has ideas on improving the operation of the device. I have also been trying to get research funding for formal CAD simulation, to verify the math, but it has been an uphill battle.

I'd appreciate any feedback that you have about the device, especially the math, and if you wanna make your own fork, please go right ahead.

Interestingly, when I asked a super-smart piece of software about bunker enthusiasts, it mistakenly sent a link to an earlier post on Effective Altruism: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tJi3foZzwRayAysXW/the-bunker-fallacy

I really liked that read. We need towns and cities to have multiple methods of power generation. That is the fairest most sustainable path to long-term stabilization of the grid. The proposed device is not volume efficient, so it probably wouldn't be the most popular idea, even for a bunker. But it may be one of the easiest methods of power generation to shield from radiation. If it works, that is. 

Some pump tower designs could share the cost of building up, if light-weight solar panels or wind turbines are added to the top of the structural design. I think this trio is an eco-friendly method to create a solid, local mix of power generation methods in a site-generic way that still allows for load-following. 

Thanks for reading my spiel.