Energy Atols

Apparently Belgium is toying with using donut shaped islands as huge electricity storying batteries… which seems incredibly inefficient to me… but which is, apparently, not.

There are a couple of things interesting about this – one is that wind energy is creating a surplus. The other is that it’s not entirely impossible that it’d be able to generate energy all on its own, even on still days, using tidal power. If it wasn’t 15 metres high that is. That’s high. Even for me.

I wonder how small these things could be… which is to say, I wonder if they could be household size. It’s a similar principle to the recently quite famous, but “I’ll believe it when I see it”, gravity lamp.

Which did massively well on Indiegogo – but I’m always a bit suspicious of well-meaning Westerners “solving problems” for people they feel sorry for. These don’t really have a good track-record… and there’s this tendency for the audience not being people in the third world, but other well-meaning people in the 1st. TED talks. All that sort of thing.

It’s a simple technology though… moving magnets, rather than nefarious chemicals… and I’ve got a bit of a soft-spot for simple technologies… especially those that have a manual fall-back.