A Short Course in Comprehensive Thinking – Part 2: The World’s Best Heating System and the World’s Best Heat Engines
All of those were in our stable when we were wiped out.
Thinking comprehensively in our industrial (Fourth) Epoch requires at least some scientific literacy, and the more the better. Less than 10% of Americans have appreciable scientific literacy, and that is part of our problem as a species. And of those who are scientifically literate, very few have escaped their scientistic indoctrination, which is even more of a problem. Virtually all scientists react with denial and fear when the subject of free energy is broached, as Brian O’Leary discovered the hard way. But I want to lay aside free-energy theorizing for now and just cover mundane scientific issues that all people should know the rudiments of, in this short course on comprehensive thinking.
In the Ventura catastrophe’s aftermath I hit the books, and one of the first things that I did was study thermodynamics, Dennis Lee’s heat pump, and my mentor’s and Victor Fischer’s engine patents. It took a month or two. Understanding why Dennis’s heat pump is the world’s best heating system was not difficult. Students learn the rudiments in their first week of thermodynamics class. Sadi Carnot was the father of thermodynamics, and I presented his seminal equations. Heat engines take advantage of temperature differentials to produce work while heat pumps use work to move around heat. They are two sides of the same coin.
Electric power plants get boiler temperatures of thousands of degrees and exhaust to environmental temperatures. Their thermal efficiencies (the percent of the moving heat that is translated into useful work) rarely get over 40%, which is about half of the Carnot ideal. Many billions of dollars have gone into making power plants more energy efficient. The air-to-air heat pump, however, only gets maybe 15% of the Carnot ideal. Dennis’s heat pump got around 40% of the Carnot ideal. It was all about that huge evaporator panel, which provided multiples of the efficiencies of air-to-air heat pumps because of the vast surface area for heat exchange. It is really easy to understand that.
Because Dennis’s heat pump has been wiped out in North America, Americans have two basic options for heating:
1. Burn fossil fuels on site in furnaces;
2. Air-to-air heat pumps.
A relative few can burn wood. Since the oil crisis of 1973-1974, which ended humanity’s most prosperous era, American heating systems have become far more efficient. There are two basic options for using fossil fuel for heating: burn it on site or burn it in a power plant and use that electricity to run heat pumps. Both are comparable, in how much energy is used to produce heat. Dennis’s heat pump delivers the same amount of heat for only half of the energetic cost of those options. Fossil-fuel providers for furnaces and electric companies that promote heat pumps could not compete with something that did the same job for half of the cost. That was why Dennis’s heat pump has been wiped out in North America.
Only one company in the world that I know of sells the Dennis-style heat pump, but they seem to have the quality and economy-of-scale problems that small operations face. Dennis tried to build an industry around his heat pump, which would have readily overcome the problems of small operations. Dennis thought that the electric companies would throw him a tickertape parade for bringing the conservation that their full-page ads begged for. Dennis delivered far more conservation than they had in mind, so they called in their favors to wipe out his Seattle company. That is how the real world of capitalism works, not the propaganda version. Of course, the people who run the world have possessed free-energy technology for longer than I have been alive, and their efforts to prevent any independent attempts from delivering it have been impressive.
It was also not hard to understand why my mentor’s and Fischer’s heat engines were so superior (they produced far less entropy), but even I am skeptical that marrying their engines with Dennis’s panels could produce free energy. But real skepticism means finding out, not what the “skeptics” do. I have seen several scientists argue that it is possible, but compared to the free-energy devices that I am aware of, heat pumps and heat engines are primitive technologies that will not survive into the Fifth Epoch.
In this short course, I will present quite a few scientific issues, but they will not be harder to understand than this presentation on heat engines and heat pumps.