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sketches by Martin Nix
Reinventing Fire
The story of Solar Smelters International
by Martin Nix
Shhh! There is a dirty secret that the fuel dinosaurs do not want you to know: you can make your own energy.
I will admit it. I am a solar energy inventor, patented even. I am constantly coming up with new inventions that, well, tick the old fossils off.
Like many inventors, I have seen it all. Snake oil salesmen will do anything to stop the solar revolution. The peddlers of petroleum get rich off it. Military arms dealers get rich off military arms sales to the oil sheiks. Whole industries want you to be dependent on "their" energy source and simply don't want to see electric vehicles, bicycle paths, or even light rail trains running on solar energy.
I know, I have been on the blunt end of it. During my engineering-architecture college days, when Jimmy Carter was president, he tried to get the nation off foreign oil quickly, but was blocked by a Republican Congress.
I was hired to help develop a computer simulation to bring the nation off foreign oil. The energy interest were ticked! They wanted us to believe that coal power plant pollution was not a problem, and that nuclear power plants don't blow up. Rapid transit systems were, well, you know....
Most of us solar inventors have indeed found ourselves targeted by covert operations. In those days, solar inventors were delegated to the status of perpetual motion.
For example, Expedito Parente, the Brazilian chemist who invented the now popular biodiesel formula, had his formula labeled secret by the military government of Brazil.
I was severely reprimanded at New Mexico State University Solar Institute for researching the technology of converting algae to diesel fuel. Few know this, but underneath the American West is a huge salt water aquifer that could grow algae for fuel in the deserts...enough to power the entire USA.
Inventors of super-efficient solar hot water systems, large windmills, and photovoltaics all have had to go overseas to get their inventions into mass production. Today, Germany, China and Japan are real powerhouses on solar energy equipment. Not the USA. Simply put, the Reagan/Bush administrations wanted renewable energy stopped by any means.
That changed with Barack Obama. And with the recent high price of energy, people now have taken notice about renewable technologies.
I have long been working on harnessing high temperatures from the sun. In the 1980s, I invented a new type of solar cooker and approached Seattle's Billionaire Club about private investments into manufacturing for solar cookers.
You know, the rich have lots of ways to cook food: charcoal, gas, electricity, microwaves. But for people in refugee camps—surrounded by desert and landmines—solar cookers are a lifeline. Simply put, to the energy wasteful rich, solar cooking is a joke. Today, solar cookers are being manufactured and being shipped to Haiti by not for profit charities.
Recently, I invented a new (patent pending) solar smelter. It melts rocks, glass and metal. These could replace coal in large power plants. But high temperature solar collectors—which make temperatures in the 5,000F degree range—simply aren't in mass production. You can't buy these at Home Depot. Melting materials by sunlight is not new, what is new is making it ergonomic and safe.
Again, I've approached venture capitalists. All I've gotten back was the usual double talk. The energy wasteful rich just don't get it.
Somehow, they seem to instead come up with investments in nuclear power plants, stadiums, and Gulf Oil Wars.
So, faced with an impossible situation, I and some trusted volunteers have formed a group called Solar Smelters International. We do "solarsmithing" worldwide. It's possible for people to build these smelters themselves.
Africa, for example is desperate for this device. Right now people deforest the continent to get firewood.
That is the reason why I've formed a nonprofit, to help get the word out. The goal is to put industrial process solar temperatures into the hands of anyone.
Solar Smelters International is dedicated to bringing high temperature industrial process heat to the common person. We are reinventing fire.
Check us out. Spread the word. Help out. Make It Happen. May the sun be with you!
Info at twitter.com/sunbustion and www.solarsmeltersinternational.org. Other solar contacts are at www.solarcookers.org, www.solarwashington.org, and www.ases.org. ◆
I'm all for your solar smelter tech, don't get me wrong. I just hope it's better technically founded than your algae biofuel ideas. Commercial scale algae for biofuel - enough to make a dent in this countries energy needs will require fertilizers. Those fertilizers come from petroleum - like the ones that produce 85% of global food. "Peak oil" and that's end of the algae biofuel story. Price of algae production rises ahead of petroleum costs and consequently never competes. Forget the waste nutrients,too. They are in the wrong places to be cost efficient. Having produced algae commercially for the last 30+ years - I know a little about it from a dollars and cents standpoint. So don't hold your breath for algae biofuel in quantities to make any real difference. Maybe your solar smelters will work better. Spread the word.
The US Government has spent over $2.5 billion dollars on algae research in the last 35 years and all we have to show for it are shelves full of useless patents. Algae have been researched at universities and in laboratories in the US for over 50 years, financed in significant part by government funds. One of the largest problems is that the research has been done in laboratories and at universities, using federal funds, and there is fear at that level that commercialization will ‘ruin it for them’. What it will ruin is the steady stream of ‘free’ money flowing from the DOE, NREL, the DOD, DARPA and other Washington-based agencies to University Row.
[comment shortened]
The question you need to be asking is " Does the US really want to get off of foreign oil or do we want to continue to fund the algae researchers at the universities." The problem is we can grow, harvest and extract algae today with all "off-the-shelf" proven technology. We no not need genetic modification at all when there are existing algae strains currently on the market with 30-60% oil content. Algae production requires far less land and water than any other terrestrial crop (see page 194 of the DOE’s National Algal Biofuels Technology Roadmap), which has the farmers in an uproar right now. The ethanol credits went away, allegedly shutting down an industry – can it really be that without the tax credit, years of time, effort and expense will be for naught, leaving us with unedible genetically modified corn fields?
www.algalbiomass.org
www.nationalalgaeassociation.com
http://replenishenergy.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqAzoS8YZ6Y&feature=player_embedded